Smartbills offers consumable digital receipts, enabling Canadians to track and understand their spending on each item, with detailed insight.
Montreal-based and software engineer graduate from Polytechnique Montréal Sébastien Labine is on a mission to help Canadians and Canadian businesses better track and manage their finances.
With a previous experience at Clicknpark who he helped scale their users from 10K to 300K, Labine is now focused on his new venture to provide better transparency on purchasing and managing one’s finances through his innovative digital-wallet – a solution increasingly in need in Canada with the rise of grocery costs and general cost of living on the rise.
He was selected across Canada to be part of Fintech Cadence’s 2025 Innovate Financial Health Cohort (The IFH Lab), a virtual program dedicated to founders who are on a mission to help improve the financial health of Canadians and Canadian businesses. Today, we sit with Sébastien to learn more about Smartbills, his personal story and what keeps him motivated in his entrepreneurial journey.
Tell us about your startup and what inspired you to start it.
Smartbills is a digital platform that helps Canadians automatically receive, organize, and manage their receipts and invoices for both personal and business expenses, making financial management effortless and transparent.
The idea came from a simple observation during my school days, walking past bins overflowing with discarded paper receipts everywhere I went. It was clear that important financial information was being lost daily because people lacked an easy way to track their receipts. This inspired me to build a solution that automatically captures receipts directly from merchants and point-of-sale systems, eliminating the need for manual saving or entry.
By automating receipt collection for personal and business use, Smartbills empowers individuals, freelancers, and small businesses by giving them back financial transparency and control, helping them make smarter decisions with less hassle and greater confidence.
What drew you to entrepreneurship and what energizes you to pursue Smartbills even when things aren't going as planned?
What keeps me energized, even when things aren’t going well, is hearing the problem again and again from people everywhere I go. It’s clear that managing receipts, tracking expenses, and gaining control over finances is a real pain point for so many. That constant, real-world feedback reminds me how important our work is and motivates me to keep pushing forward to build solutions that truly help.
How do you interpret your success? What about your failures?
I see success not just as a final destination but as progress along a journey that is rarely a straight line. In the bigger picture, the entrepreneurial path has its ups and downs, moments of breakthrough and moments of setback. Success is about recognizing and appreciating the forward movement, even when it’s small or when things seem to stall or take a step back. The journey itself is a continuous learning process, full of twists and turns. Sometimes you feel like you’re moving uphill; other times, it might feel like you’re taking a step back. But each experience, whether labeled as success or failure, contributes to growth. Embracing this complexity helps maintain resilience and keeps me motivated to keep pushing forward, knowing that real progress happens over time and isn’t always linear.
What inspires you when it comes to finding a solution to help the financial health of Canadians? And to follow, what unique financial health challenges or opportunities do you see happening in the Canadian market?
What inspires me about improving the financial health of Canadians is the opportunity to make people feel more confident, secure, and in control of their money. For so many, managing expenses and receipts feels overwhelming and stressful, which can lead to avoidable financial mistakes or missed opportunities. Even for me, despite having good financial health, I still struggle at times with tracking expenses, sharing costs with others, or splitting bills, which can quickly get complicated and frustrating.
I believe that with the right tools, Canadians can shift from reacting to their finances to proactively managing them, whether that means maximizing deductions, tracking spending in real time, or easily sharing and splitting expenses with others. Seeing how even small improvements in financial organization can reduce stress and improve quality of life is incredibly motivating, and it’s what drives me to keep building solutions like Smartbills that empower people and businesses across Canada.
The biggest opportunities in fintech over the next few years will come from open banking and embedded finance, enabling seamless, personalized financial experiences. Consumers and businesses increasingly expect real-time insights and automation tailored to their needs, including better management of invoices and receipts, which are crucial for cash flow and expense tracking. Fintechs that can securely integrate data from banks, point-of-sale systems, and invoicing platforms—leveraging AI to automate categorization and reconciliation—will have a strong advantage. Challenges remain around building trust with users given rising concerns about data privacy and cybersecurity. Additionally, financial inclusion and accessibility will continue to be important to ensure innovations benefit all segments of the population.
What's the best career advice you've ever received?
The best career advice I’ve received is to listen, not just to hear, but to truly understand what others are saying. Listening deeply means being open to different perspectives rather than relying solely on your own perception. Often, our perception can be limited or biased, but by embracing others’ perspectives, you gain richer insights and a clearer understanding of the problem or situation. Whether it’s from customers, team members, mentors, or your own intuition, active listening helps build stronger relationships and leads to better decision-making. It’s a skill that’s easy to overlook but incredibly powerful throughout any career.
What did you learn from scaling past ventures such as ClicknPark that you're applying to Smartbills? Anything you would do differently this time?
From my experience at clicknpark, I learned how important it is to deeply understand your ideal customer before trying to scale. Building a product that solves a real, validated problem is critical, but so is making sure people know about it and trust it. Working in a fast-paced environment taught me the power of delivering value consistently, which naturally fuels word-of-mouth growth. I also saw how essential it is to build a strong product culture internally, where every team member feels empowered to solve problems proactively and think creatively about customer needs.
If I could do it differently, I would have invested earlier in building a stronger sales presence on the ground to develop a better parking infrastructure for our app. At one point, we had more demand than available parking spots, which limited our ability to scale effectively. Having more team members focused on partnerships and site acquisition would have helped us secure supply ahead of growth and deliver a better overall experience. That lesson, proactively aligning supply with demand and supporting it with a strong customer success foundation, is something I’m carrying forward into how we build and scale Smartbills today.
For all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, what advice would you give to someone who is thinking about starting their own startup? What book(s), podcast(s) or movie(s) do you highly recommend?
If you’re thinking about starting your own startup, my biggest advice is to focus first and foremost on deeply understanding the problem you want to solve. Talk to real people who experience it, listen carefully, and validate that it’s a pain point worth solving before building anything. Many founders jump into building a solution based on assumptions, but early validation saves time, money, and frustration down the road. Starting a company requires resilience and grit, so be prepared to face uncertainty and setbacks. But if you stay close to your customers and keep iterating based on their feedback, you’ll build something truly valuable. And remember, it’s not about building the perfect product from day one. It’s about learning quickly and adapting. That mindset is what increases your chances of success.
As per the recomendations:
I highly recommend The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, which offers a practical and iterative approach to building products people actually want! It’s been a huge influence on how I think about validating ideas. Another favorite is The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, which dives deep into how human behavior and emotions often drive financial decisions far more than logic or numbers.
I’m especially drawn to books that blend finance and psychology because psychology forms the foundation of how we respond and make choices as humans.
What are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of having the courage to build Smartbills in the first place. Launching something from scratch is incredibly hard, and it’s not something everyone is capable of or willing to take on. It means accepting risk, uncertainty, and a lot of personal sacrifice along the way. For me, the pride comes not just from the product itself, but from the willingness to step up, put myself out there, and try to create something meaningful that can genuinely improve the financial lives of Canadians. Whether Smartbills becomes a massive success or simply helps a smaller group of people, the act of trying, of moving an idea forward and turning it into a real solution, is an achievement I’ll always value.
Finally, what’s next for Smartbills?
What’s next for us at Smartbills is an exciting phase of growth and partnership. We’re scaling our merchant network by connecting with more point-of-sale and accounting software providers to help businesses automatically deliver invoices and receipts to their customers. This not only helps build loyalty, increase repeat sales, reduce administrative costs, and improve customer experience, but also provides valuable insights into consumer spending habits. If you’re a merchant looking to build stronger relationships and drive more value from your customers, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can create seamless financial management experiences that empower businesses and Canadians alike.
Where to find Smartbills:
Register to our upcoming IFH Lab Showcase here to listen to Sébastien pitch – taking place online on July 31st.
More on Smartbills:
Website | Linkedin
Connect with Sébastien here.
