In this exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Stephen Edginton, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Dext, shares how his AI-driven solutions are revolutionizing financial workflows for businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers. With extensive experience at companies like Epicor Software and Dot-Net-IT, Stephen brings a wealth of expertise in digital transformation and product innovation. As Dext continues to grow, Stephen is leading the charge in integrating intelligent automation to simplify bookkeeping and empower Canadian small and medium-sized businesses. With the launch of Dext Payments and other cutting-edge innovations, Stephen’s insights provide a glimpse into how AI is reshaping the financial landscape for SMEs in Canada and beyond.
Stephen Edginton, leads the global product and engineering teams at Dext in crafting top-tier, AI-driven solutions empowering businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers to do more. Formerly the Chief Innovation Officer and SVP of Engineering at Epicor Software and co-founded the software development and consultancy company Dot-Net-IT, aiding global clients in digital transformations. With a rich background collaborating with diverse businesses, Stephen advocates AI as the key to unlocking greater potential in the business realm.
Dext recently announced a strategic partnership with Airwallex. How will this collaboration help modernize financial workflows for Canadian small and medium-sized businesses, and what unique benefits can your customers expect?
Our mission is to make bookkeeping effortless for Canadian small and medium-sized businesses, whether they manage it themselves or work with accountants and bookkeepers.
By integrating Airwallex’s world-class payments infrastructure with Dext’s intelligent automation platform, we’re completing the accounts payable (AP) journey within a single, trusted ecosystem. This partnership brings invoice capture, payment, and reconciliation into one seamless, end-to-end automated workflow.
The result is Dext Payments, a unified solution for managing supplier and employee expense payments. It simplifies what has traditionally been a fragmented process and creates a streamlined experience for SMEs and their advisors. Looking ahead, we plan to expand this solution to support payment links, making it even easier for businesses to get paid quickly and securely.
With Dext Payments, Canadian businesses can expect:
• Frictionless AP workflows from invoice to payment to reconciliation
• 99% data accuracy through industry-leading automation
• A single source of truth across bookkeeping and payments
• Reduced admin time, fewer errors, and faster month-end close
Dext Payments will launch later this year in Canada for supplier payments. It’s a significant step forward in empowering businesses to do more with less effort, giving both accountants and entrepreneurs greater leverage to thrive.
With the upcoming launch of Dext Payments this fall, what new capabilities will Canadian SMEs gain, and how do you see this product changing the landscape of bookkeeping and accounting for your clients?
Today’s SMBs face increasingly complex operations, and an unpredictable economy is creating a state of financial flux for many Canadian business owners. Solutions that help mitigate common stresses, such as ensuring prompt payment on invoices and not missing supplier and expense payments, are more important than ever to stay on top of cashflow.
Dext Payments brings everything together in one place, eliminating friction and providing SMEs with the clarity, control, and confidence they need to ensure that not only are their invoices paid on time, but that they pay expenses on time too. Streamlining these financial processes reduces operational burden and helps strengthen relationships with vendors, and their employees.
For SMEs that use Dext with accountants and bookkeepers, combined with the built in approval workflows they can ensure bills are routed correctly, approved and paid without losing context. They can pay suppliers with confidence every time. Dext’s payment solution is built to protect SMEs identity, accounts, and funds. Every step is safeguarded against fraud and unauthorized access. Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) ensures that only authorized individuals can approve payments. Dext’s rich data set automatically verifies supplier and payment details, flagging invoices with modified bank information to help detect potential fraud and support secure, compliant processing.
As everything is integrated seamlessly within the platform, business leaders have a real-time holistic view of their financial health. This visibility ensures businesses can stay competitive and focus on growing.
Canada has become a key growth market for Dext, with 45,000 SMB customers and a 20% year-over-year revenue increase. What factors have driven your success in Canada, and why is this market so important to your company’s strategy?
Canada has emerged as a key growth market for Dext, with over 45,000 SMB customers and a 20% year-over-year increase in revenue. Its economic and cultural similarities to the UK, where Dext is headquartered made it a natural choice for international expansion when we entered the market in 2018.
Like the UK, Canada’s economy is powered by small and mighty businesses, which make up 98% of all employer businesses and support more than 10 million jobs, or roughly two-thirds of private sector employment. Recognizing the vital role of SMEs, we saw a clear opportunity to help business owners and their accounting partners save time, reduce risk, and increase financial clarity through automation.
Since then, our growth has been driven by strong adoption among both SMBs and advisors. Over 1,800 Canadian accounting and bookkeeping firms now use Dext daily to automate financial workflows for their SME clients including leading national firms such as MNP and BDO Canada. These partners rely on our platform to streamline data capture and reconciliation, enabling them to deliver more strategic advice powered by up-to-the-minute financial information.
In Canada alone, Dext processes over 34 million receipts and invoices annually, a number that continues to rise year over year. This momentum reinforces Canada’s importance in our long-term strategy: a market with deep alignment to our core strengths and the evolving needs of modern, data-driven accounting practices.
Dext has introduced new products like Vault and Dext Self-Employed, and continues to enhance its platform with AI. Can you share how artificial intelligence is shaping your product roadmap and what recent innovations Canadian businesses should be excited about?
At Dext, we believe AI isn’t just about replacing tasks, it’s about creating leverage. Just as today’s most powerful AI tools use tools themselves, we’re building intelligent systems that work behind the scenes to amplify what accountants, bookkeepers, and business owners can do.
Take Dext Vault, an AI-powered space that replaces the chaos of scattered storage. It automatically summarizes, tags, names, and categorizes key documents like contracts, leases, and agreements, making them instantly searchable and organized. It also extracts due dates, proactively surfacing critical info to help professionals stay ahead of compliance, renewals, and advisory decisions.
But Vault is just one part of the picture. AI powers our platform’s ability to automate with real accuracy, at real scale. In just the first six months of this year, Dext processed over 173 million invoices, 1.45 million supplier statements, and 5.3 million line items, all at 99% accuracy. That’s not an AI demo, it’s operational trust from hundreds of thousands of SMEs worldwide.
We’ve also launched an AI feature that flags fraud from AI-generated receipts, and are now embedding more agentic behaviour to reduce admin and reclaim time.
These innovations are just the beginning. We’re building AI that works for real businesses, in the real world.
As a leader with decades of experience in technology and business transformation, what final advice or insights would you offer to Canadian SMBs looking to leverage technology for growth and resilience in today’s evolving market?
In today’s environment, Canadian SMBs don’t need more buzzwords, they need tools that deliver real leverage. AI has become the loudest conversation in tech, but the truth is most of the noise isn’t useful. What matters isn’t the flashiest demo or the biggest claim, it’s whether the technology works, day in and day out, at the scale your business needs.
Years ago, the leap forward was from paper to spreadsheets. Today, the real divide is between businesses that still rely on outdated desktop systems and those embracing intelligent, AI-powered platforms designed for the way we work now, fast, remote, integrated, and mobile.
My advice is don’t wait for the “perfect” time to modernize. Remember that a week is 2% of the year and the longer you hold on to legacy systems, the more hidden costs you accumulate. Wasted time, missed insights, and slower decisions cost more than you think.
Choose a technology partner that grows with you. Look for platforms that are proven, widely adopted, and trusted in the accounting ecosystem. Ones that understand small business, that automate the right work, and give you better data not just more of it.
Growth and resilience come from knowing when to adapt. And in 2025, the most resilient businesses will be the ones who’ve already made that move.
