Finance and insurance
This sector comprises establishments primarily engaged in financial transactions (that is, transactions involving the creation, liquidation, or change in ownership of financial assets) or in facilitating financial transactions. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 41,611
- Under 10 employeesA
- 66%
- Establishments · USA
- 480,546
- Employment · USA
- 6,831,897
- Payroll · USA
- $845.1B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 41,611 Canadian establishments with employees, 66% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
There is nothing to enter here. The Bank of Canada exists under its own Act of Parliament, and the five Canadian establishments in this code are its head office and regional offices, not five competitors [A]. The honest screen is that this is a buyer, not a market, and the useful question is what it buys. Its 2025 financial statements answer with unusual clarity. The Bank ran on $740M of operating expenditures: $416M of staff costs, $115M of technology and telecommunications, $80M of depreciation, $42M of premises and $36M of bank note research, production and processing [A], against $124.3B of notes in circulation. So the addressable spend is one technology line of $115M and a bank note budget that swings with the production cycle — $10M in 2024, $36M in 2025 [A]. Both are reachable only through federal-style procurement with security clearance, long qualification and, for notes, a specialist secure-printing industry with very few qualified suppliers. A new vendor can win work here, but as an extension of an existing security, data or research business that already holds the clearances — not as a reason to start one. One institution with one procurement office is a customer concentration of 100%. Note also what this is not: a profit pool. The Bank recorded a net loss of $82M in 2025 after $3,079M in 2024 [A], the residue of interest paid on settlement balances, which has nothing to do with suppliers. Payment systems, clearing and settlement sit elsewhere in sector 52 and are not covered by this record.
An exchange looks like the purest toll road in finance, and TMX Group's 2025 shows why people want one: revenue of $1,717.2M, up 18%, with income from operations of $771.0M [A] — a 45% operating margin on a business that holds no inventory and takes no market risk. Recognition by a securities commission is a real hurdle, but it has been cleared in Canada more than once, so it is not the cut. The cut is that the incumbent is not vulnerable where the money is. Of TMX's revenue, equities and fixed-income trading and clearing — the only part a new marketplace actually contests — was $283.4M, about 17% [A]. The rest is capital formation ($297.4M), derivatives trading and clearing ($434.5M) and data, indices and analytics ($701.8M) [A]: lines that belong to whoever already has the issuers, the clearing house and the tape. A challenger venue can win matching share by cutting fees to near zero, and in doing so earns near zero, while order flow returns to the deepest book whenever spreads matter. Liquidity is the product, and only incumbency manufactures it. The 65 Canadian establishments are mostly one-to-four-person entities — holding shells, commodity and niche venues, representative offices — around a single 500-plus employer. The software sold to this industry is screened separately at 5231 and 5239.
Brokerage books are bought by consolidators using cheap acquisition debt and carrier contingent commissions an individual buyer does not earn, which sets a price a first-time acquirer cannot match without overpaying. Carrier appointments and provincial licensing gate entry, and the retiring-broker succession wave that makes this look accessible is the same wave the consolidators are systematically working. The agency management software at this code is studied separately.
This code counts pools of money, not businesses. A pension fund exists because an employer or a government sponsors a plan; nobody founds one to compete for customers, and its members are assigned by their employment rather than won. The honest screen is that this is a buyer, not a market to enter, and the addressable market for an entrant as a pension fund is nil — which is why the cut is market size even though the pools are vast. Statistics Canada put trusteed pension assets at $2.6 trillion at the end of 2025, up 6.2%, with public-sector plans holding $2.1 trillion — 82.4% of the total — against $460.6 billion in private-sector plans [A]. That concentration is the second finding. The establishment count bears it out: 70 employers, of which 17 have 200 or more staff — the large public plans that run investment teams in-house — while private-sector plan assets grew only 1.5% in the year. So even what is sold to these funds (asset management mandates, custody, actuarial and administration services) faces a small number of very large buyers who increasingly do the work themselves, and a long tail of private plans that is barely growing. Those supplier markets are the ones to screen; the fund-administration software sold into this branch is screened separately at 526.
A fund is a legal vehicle, so the enterable proposition here is the act of launching one — registering as an investment fund manager, filing a prospectus and seeding a mutual fund or ETF. Read that way the category is enormous and growing: SIMA reported mutual fund assets of $2.797 trillion and ETF assets of $924.2 billion at the end of August 2026, both all-time highs [A]. The vehicle is also cheap to create relative to that pool; trustees, custodians and administrators are all for hire, which is the point of the 526 fund-administration record nearby. The cut is who decides which funds a saver is shown. A fund does not sell itself: it is placed by an adviser from a dealer's approved shelf, or picked by a self-directed investor from a screen sorted by size, fee and track record — and a new fund has none of the three. The flow figures show where the marginal dollar goes: ETF net sales of $15.5 billion in August against $4.7 billion for mutual funds [A], into a format where the product is an index somebody else publishes, the fee is the only variable left, and the winners are the issuers with the scale to live on it. The 681 establishments, 508 of them with one to four employees, are mostly the vehicles themselves and small managers running private pools — real businesses, but built on a client book the founder already had, not on a product launched cold.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
A core replacement is the single riskiest project a bank undertakes — ledger, deposits, payments and regulatory reporting move at once — so cores are replaced roughly once a generation. The incumbents' position rests on that, not on product quality. The modern challengers (Mambu, Thought Machine, 10x) have each raised hundreds of millions and are still fighting for reference customers a decade in.
One vendor sits in the path of roughly nine in ten US mortgages and owns both origination and servicing after the Black Knight merger. The most credible challenger has been losing share for three years. Regulatory examination of the origination workflow adds a compliance floor on top. The interesting question in this market is antitrust, not entry.
Well-funded on both sides: entrenched incumbents inside bank procurement and a dense field of venture-backed challengers already competing for the same AML and sanctions-screening budgets. Note the Canadian precedent — Verafin (Killick Capital-backed, and present in this repo's angel dataset) proves the market rewards a winner, and also that the winner has already emerged.
The thesis behind this category is true, and the proof is on EDGAR — which is exactly why it is a bad place for a new entrant. Toast's FY2025 10-K (year ended 2025-12-31) reports financial technology solutions revenue of $5,037M against subscription services revenue of $936M, on $195.1B of gross payment volume [A]. Payments is 5.4x the software line by revenue and still bigger by gross profit — $1,146M from fintech against $672M from subscriptions, computed from the 10-K's own cost-of-revenue table — even though the fintech margin is about 23% against 72% for software. AppFolio shows the same shape in property management: Value Added Services (electronic payments, tenant screening, risk mitigation) $721.5M against subscription services $211.5M in FY2025 [A]. The atlas's own vertical records reach the same answer from the other side: payments and insurance attach decides self-storage (Storable), marina (DockMaster Payments, Storable Marine), salon (Fresha at zero subscription), medspa (Boulevard, Zenoti) and field-service (Jobber, Housecall Pro) — all of them treat the licence as the cheap part. But the value flows to the software company that owns the merchant, not to the rail it rents. The infrastructure layer underneath is held by two giants. Stripe says businesses on it generated $1.9 trillion of volume in 2025, up 34%, and priced a tender offer at $159B (newsroom, 2026-02-24) [B]. Adyen reported FY2025 net revenue of EUR 2,364.2M on EUR 1,394.3B processed, with issuing volumes up 8x as platforms embedded cards (H2 2025 results, 2026-02-12) [A]. Below them the processors bought their way in: FIS bought Payrix in 2022, and Global Payments completed its purchase of Worldpay on 2026-01-12, serving more than 6 million merchant locations on $3.7 trillion of volume with an 'Integrated & Platforms' channel [A, 8-K]. The venture-funded challengers are small next to that and are selling the same thing: Finix (over $208M raised, Series C led by Acrew), Rainforest ($57.5M, Series B led by Matrix and Infinity Ventures, 2025-09-08), Tilled (nearly $40M), Infinicept ($23M growth round, 2022), Moov ($77.5M). Each one positions itself as cheaper or more vertical-friendly than Stripe — Rainforest's model is a consumption-based cut of each transaction with no platform fee [B] — which means the wedge is price, paid for out of a thin interchange margin. The adjacent layers (BaaS: Unit $169.6M, Treasury Prime ~$73M; embedded lending: Parafin $194M; embedded payroll: Check, $75M Series C led by Stripe) last raised in 2021-24 and none has announced a larger round since in the coverage opened here. An entrant needs a sponsor bank, card-network registration, underwriting and risk reserves before earning its first basis point, then has to win platforms that can renegotiate or switch processors once their volume is large. Entry cost and regulatory drag decide it. The money in this theme is earned by building the vertical software and attaching one of these rails — the right move for a Research Upon vertical, not a market to enter as the rail.
Three disclosed lines — SS&C at $6.27B, FIS Capital Markets at $3.20B and Broadridge's technology-and-operations recurring book at $1.92B — put a floor above $11B on this market, and every dollar of it sits behind clearing-house certification, SOC and regulatory audit. Entry is a multi-year certification programme before revenue, which is the wrong shape for a small team.
The moat here is legal as well as commercial: credit ratings used for regulatory capital purposes must come from a designated agency (NRSRO in the US, equivalent recognition elsewhere), and that designation is not obtainable by a startup. The adjacent data and analytics businesses are defended by decades of accumulated proprietary history that cannot be back-filled. This is the clearest example in this research of a market where the barrier is a licence somebody else already holds. Sourced update: S&P Global's Market Intelligence segment alone is a $4.92B business and Moody's Analytics is now 97% recurring — an entrant is not selling data into a gap but into two subscription estates that already own the workflow.
Policy administration, billing and claims for a carrier is the insurance equivalent of a core banking replacement: multi-year, regulator-visible, and undertaken about once a generation. Guidewire's 25–30% share of Tier 1 and 2 carriers rests on that replacement cycle rather than on product superiority, and the mid-market is already contested by a Vista-backed Duck Creek and two international challengers. Distinct from the broker-side study at 524210 — different buyer, different system, an order of magnitude more capital.
The pain is real and documented; the customer base is shrinking and the transaction volume driving the wedge is declining 5.1% year over year. A hated incumbent is not the same as a vulnerable one.
A fund administrator's system holds the capital account of record, so the buyer's diligence is an audit — SOC 1 Type II, custodian integrations and a reference list of funds that already trust it — before a single subscription is signed. SS&C, whose $6.27B is recorded against the capital-markets screen at 5231, is the same balance sheet met from a different angle.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 93
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arthur J. GallagherPrivate | Insurance agencies and brokerages524210 | $13.9B | 1/16 |
| SS&CNASDAQ:SSNC | Securities and commodity contracts intermediation and brokerage5231 | $6.3B | 1/6 |
| Brown & BrownPrivate | Insurance agencies and brokerages524210 | $5.9B | 2/16 |
| NICENASDAQ:NICE | Activities related to credit intermediation5223 | $2.9B | 1/9 |
| ICE Mortgage TechnologyPrivate | Non-depository credit intermediation5222 | $2.2B | 1/5 |
| GuidewireNYSE:GWRE | Insurance carriers5241 | $1.4B | 1/7 |
| TMX GroupTSX:X | Securities and commodity exchanges5232 | $1.7B | 1/4 |
| NASDAQNASDAQ:NDAQ | Activities related to credit intermediation5223 | — | 2/9 |
| BloomaPrivate | Non-depository credit intermediation5222 | — | 2/5 |
| BloombergPrivate | Securities and commodity contracts intermediation and brokerage5231 | — | 2/6 |
| FISNYSE:FIS | Depository credit intermediation5221 | — | 1/8 |
| HearthPrivate | Other activities related to credit intermediation522390 | — | 1/14 |
| LSEGPrivate | Securities and commodity contracts intermediation and brokerage5231 | — | 3/6 |
| nCinoPrivate | Depository credit intermediation5221 | — | 2/8 |
| RidgelinePrivate | Securities and commodity contracts intermediation and brokerage5231 | — | 4/6 |
And 78 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Finance and insurance, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
5 rows sit directly beneath 52, and 96 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.