Why Every Fintech Suddenly Wants a Canada MSB for Sale
The license that lets you keep your seat at the table when everyone else wants to cut you out of it
There is a moment in every fintech’s life when a solution provider looks at them and asks one very uncomfortable question: do you have a license?
A few years ago, nobody asked. You’d say “we have an app, we have a team, we want to move money,” and a partner bank or payment rail provider in country A or country B would shake your hand and get to work. Compliance has since grown teeth. Every bank, every banking-as-a-service provider, every payment rail, every money services business now says some version of the same thing: unless you’re licensed, we can’t deal with you directly, because that means we’re dealing with someone who isn’t.
Let’s say you’re building UK to Nigeria. You tell your partners you have a money transfer operator in the UK and a bank in Nigeria that you both work with. Fine, they say, then the bank in Nigeria signs directly with the MTO in the UK. Not with you. And there it is: your two partners are now signing an agreement with each other, and you, the fintech that built the relationship, is standing outside the room.
This is the part nobody warns you about. Once the sender and the receiver are dealing with each other directly, they can see each other’s pricing. They can see your margin. And they now know they don’t need you at all. You’ve done the hard work of introducing two parties, and you’ve handed them a reason to walk straight past you next time.
Think of it like brokering a house sale without a real estate license. You find the buyer, you find the seller, you get them talking. But you can’t legally close the deal, so the two lawyers just settle it between themselves. You did the work. They keep the commission.
So how do you solve it? You get a license
There are really only two doors worth walking through right now: a UK SPI, or Small Payment Institution license, and a Canada MSB, or money services business license. Both let you sit legitimately between two licensed parties instead of getting written out of your own deal.
The UK SPI is the more prestigious of the two, and it comes with a ceiling: you cannot process more than £3 million a month in transactions. It’s also brutally expensive to acquire. Today, a UK SPI shell is going for anywhere between £150,000 and £180,000, with some changing hands as high as £220,000. That price isn’t about the paperwork, it’s about scarcity. Approval rates for new SPI applications are low, so everyone who wants one is bidding on the same small pool of existing ones.
And here’s the part people forget: even when you buy a UK SPI, you never actually buy the license. You buy the company that holds it. The change of control alone takes about six months to clear with the regulator. Apply fresh instead, and you’re looking at eight to twelve months just to get approved, plus another three to four months of post-license activity before you’re actually operational. Call it a year, minimum, before you can move a single transaction.
Enter the Canada MSB
A Canada MSB is a different animal entirely, and it’s why the phrase “Canada MSB for sale” has become one of the most searched terms in this industry over the last year. Prices today run from around €45,000 on the low end to a median of €50,000 to €60,000, up to €70,000 or €80,000 for the more sought-after ones. Add a buyer’s premium of roughly €5,000 to €7,500 on top, and you’re still looking at a fraction of what the UK market demands.
Get Faisal Khan’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Same rule applies: you don’t buy the license, you buy the company. But the change of control here happens in one to two weeks, not six months. You notify FINTRAC, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada and the body that issues these licenses, of the change in ownership and, if you’re renaming the company, the change of name too. Say you bought a company called Acme and you want to rename it ABC. The license itself still shows Acme until FINTRAC processes the update, which takes 45 to 60 days. Slow, yes. But nowhere near a year.
It is very important to remember that these licenses, the ones trading in this price range, are non-RPAA. RPAA stands for the Retail Payments Activity Act, and it’s issued not by FINTRAC but by the Bank of Canada. If you intend to work with Canadian entities or Canadian consumers directly, you need RPAA registration on top of your MSB license, and that’s a separate three to six month process, sometimes longer depending on the queue. If your business model is purely a pass-through corridor, routing funds between two non-Canadian counterparties, you may never need to touch RPAA at all.
What you actually do with one
Go back to the UK-to-Nigeria example. Once you’re licensed out of Canada, you sign the agreement with your UK money transfer operator yourself. You sign the agreement with your bank in Nigeria yourself. The money moves from the UK MTO into your Canadian entity, and from your Canadian entity out to the bank in Nigeria. You’ve become the aggregator, sitting in the middle of receiving and delivery, exactly where you were trying to be before anyone asked you for a license.
This is the direction most of the fintech world is now moving in, and it’s easy to see why. A UK SPI protects a narrow slice of volume at a steep price and a long wait. A Canada MSB gets you into the room in a matter of weeks, at a fraction of the cost, and lets you build from there.
If you’re trying to buy your way into this space, whether that’s a Canada MSB for sale, a US money transmitter license, a UK SPI license, an EMI license, an API (Authorized Payment Institution) license, or you simply need MSB-friendly banks that will actually open an account for you, get in touch. We operate one of the world’s largest broker-dealer networks in this space, we’ll be showcasing that network publicly in the coming weeks, and in the meantime we have live inventory across all of the above. Reach out and let’s see what fits.
About The Author
Faisal Khan has spent over 30 years working in cross-border payments, banking access, remittances, stablecoins, money transmitter licensing, and MSB-friendly banking. He runs Faisal Khan LLC, a consultancy that helps companies navigate the hard parts of regulated financial services: getting banked, getting licensed, structuring compliant payment flows, and finding the right partners to make it all work.
He is the founder of DealHarbor, a marketplace for regulated financial services deal flow, and The Money Wiki, a knowledge platform covering banking, payments, licensing, and financial systems globally.
If something in this article is relevant to what you are working on, book a free 15-minute call. No pitch, no obligation. Just a straight conversation about whether there is something worth exploring together.
