In this exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Daire Burke, Head of Swoop North America, discusses the company’s journey helping Canadian businesses access the capital they need to grow and thrive. With a strong background in finance and consulting, including roles at Deloitte and CrossCountry Consulting, Daire has overseen Swoop’s rapid expansion across the US and Canada. Under his leadership, Swoop continues to empower entrepreneurs by streamlining access to loans, grants, and equity through innovative technology—enabling small businesses to navigate funding challenges, unlock new opportunities, and build financial resilience in an ever-changing market.
As Head of Swoop North America, Daire spearheads the company’s growth across the US and Canada. Prior to leading the Swoop’s North American expansion, Daire served as CFO where he scaled the finance & compliance functions of the company.
Swoop Funding has established itself as a unique platform for Canadian SMEs seeking financing. What motivated the Canadian expansion, and what distinct challenges or opportunities have you encountered in this market?
We launched Swoop in Canada in November 2021 and have on-boarded over 25K Canadian businesses onto the platform in that timeframe. As we were performing market research and feasibility analysis, there were a number of things that immediately became interesting to us and ultimately motivated us to launch Swoop in Canada.
- Evolving SME Financing landscape: The degree to which the 5 largest banks dominated business lending was clear, however the volume of funding being disbursed to small businesses via non-bank lenders had been steadily growing in the 5 years to that point. From our analysis, this wasn’t at the expense of bank lending which painted the picture that alternative sources of financing were slowly becoming more accessible to Canadian SMEs and filling the funding gap which were left by Canadian banks that had limited appetite for lending to small businesses.
- Open banking: Open banking has been a hot topic in Canada for some time now and was even an topic that Candidates in the 2021 Election were being quizzed on. Open banking was a significant catalyst for growth in the UK, Ireland & Australia for Swoop as our platform enabled SMEs to use their banking data to find & compare products that could improve their financial health. Although we are still waiting for an open banking framework, we felt that our platform would be well positioned to enable Canadian SMEs to take full advantage of such a framework if/when it lands.
- US market access: Launching Swoop in the US had been part of our wider strategic priorities from a very early point, and we felt that setting up a hub in Toronto would give us an excellent platform from which to launch Swoop in the US in a more capital efficient manner. We were able to build out our funding marketplace so that we support both US & Canadian SMEs. Although we have since made hires in the US, our Toronto based team today actually also supports the customer-facing side of our business in the US.
- Competition & service offering: There was nobody in the Canadian market offering SMEs access to the entire funding marketplace (loans, grants, equity) using their data. This is still the case and as such, we felt that there was a great opportunity for us to bring Swoop to market and offer Canadian SMEs something new & different that not only addresses the funding gap from their perspective but enables lenders & other funders to more effectively find suitable businesses to finance.
Canadian small businesses often struggle with traditional bank financing. How does Swoop help entrepreneurs navigate and access a wider array of funding options—including loans, grants, and equity—compared to conventional routes?
Traditional banks & Financial Institutions are not well positioned to service most small businesses in Canada. Their operating models often make it less profitable to serve small businesses (compared with mid-market or commercial banking), and so small business banking is often bundled in with personal banking (or just not offered in any meaningful way). This means that small business owners that interact with tier 1 banks often find it difficult to understand what products and services are available to them. On top of this, small business owners are extremely time poor and are not typically financial experts. Swoop is designed not only to cut through this complexity, so that a time-poor business owner can create a single application via Swoop in less than 2 minutes and get matched with suitable banking & financing options that they are eligible for. This allows them to get a clear picture of options available to them and make better decisions for their business’ financial health. Many non-bank lending and government funding programs are not visible to business owners and as a result are not utilized by many SMEs that could benefit from those funding options. Swoop allows business owners to see all options across traditional & non-traditional sources of capital.
With economic volatility affecting SME growth plans, what trends have you observed in the Canadian lending landscape, and how does Swoop adapt its offerings to support businesses in uncertain times?
Operating a small business is a difficult job at the best of times and the level of economic uncertainty that small business owners are dealing with in the first half of 2025 is on par with the early point of the pandemic (generational high). Against this backdrop, it’s been incredible to see resilience and adaptability on display across the SME userbase on our platform. Many SMEs are using grants such as CanExport to develop new markets outside of North America for their products. Programs such as DMAP and the AI compute fund gave SMEs an outlet to invest in their online GTM as well as infusing more AI into their business operations. There are new government funding pools being allocated to offer relief to businesses hit by US trade tariffs and Swoop is helping SMEs to find these programs.
While financing working capital remains the most common use of debt financing accessed via Swoop, there has been a very notable surge in the volume of small business acquisition financing applications we are seeing on the platform this year as more consolidation and transfer of assets is taking place across the country from Boomer generation entrepreneurs. Our platform is used by businesses owners to find & compare the best funding options to enable businesses owners to overcome whatever challenge they need to in a short timeframe, from funding critical working capital troughs to executing on a strategic acquisition of another business.
Digital platforms have transformed financial services. How does Swoop leverage technology and data analytics to improve funding matches, and what innovations are you most excited about for the future of SME finance?
A central pillar of Swoop’s mission is to enable SMEs to use their data to improve their financial health. To that end, Swoop integrates a wide range of data including accounting, banking, credit and company information so that business owners not only have a simplified, quick application journey but we can present a clear picture of their financial health back to them via the platform enriched with intelligent product matching across loans, grants, and equity financing. As well as matching with relevant funding options, the data ingested also enables Swoop to highlight areas in which business owners could save money on overheads such as banking, insurance or FX expenses.
Having an integration with a wide range of accounting softwares and bank feeds enables the user to quickly complete a single application to get multiple funding offers (instead of investing days completing countless offline applications with banks and lenders that may not result in any approvals).
With each new release, I’m more excited to see Swoop truly become a virtual CFO supporting business owners to make better financial & capital raising decisions. Where business owners access financial services continues to evolve and I believe that the applications that businesses are using everyday to operate their businesses will become more and more enriched with services that were previously only accessible via Banks. I’m hugely excited by this movement and how it will democratize access to financing.
Finally, what advice would you give to Canadian small business owners seeking funding in 2025, and what mindset should they adopt to build long-term financial resilience?
- Diversify your funding sources: You can’t fund a business on grants alone, but they are a great way to get more capital into your business and build more financial robustness to support longevity. Traditional lenders have lots of limitations and may not be viable options for you, consider government lending programs, alternative & supply chain lenders, crowdfunding options, angel investors and venture capital.
- Be fundable: lenders & investors cannot deploy capital unless there is clean financial reporting and easy to understand projections available. Cloud accounting & AI is making this easier than ever – you don’t need to spend a lot on accounting services to ensure this is not an issue, and aside from making funding more easy – you’ll have better clarify around understanding the drivers of your business.
- Develop & nurture relationships with advisors, bankers, investors that are active in your industry. Even if this doesn’t support an immediate/short term transaction, in the longer term this will be valuable.
- Leverate FinTech platforms and advisors to see all options that are available to you. Ask your accountant for their input and how other businesses are approaching the scenarios that you are in.
- Focus on profitability & free cash-flow: perhaps an obvious one but businesses fail because they run out of cash. Revenue is not cash, and cash is king. Cash-flow reporting should be done on a weekly basis and a relentless focus is needed on collections from customers. Managing overheads is very important to maintaining profit margins, but the strategic focus of the business owner each month should be on the drivers of revenue & growth. It’s easier to cut costs than win a new key customer or unlock a new market for your product.
- AI application: small businesses in many cases can take advantage of the fast moving AI landscape more easily than larger organizations who might be slower moving and need to bow to compliance concerns. Identify which high human touch processes exist across the business and find automation opportunities to enable the business to bolster operating margin & scalability, but also get more value from your people.
