Fintech company Canvas facilitates historic trade
Fintech company Canvas recently made Australian financial history by facilitating the first foreign exchange transaction using an Australian central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Fintech company Canvas, which was co-founded by tech entrepreneur brothers David and Daniel Lavecky as well as Tim Moddel, recently made Australian financial history by facilitating the first foreign exchange transaction using an Australian central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The historic trade was conducted as part of a CBDC pilot by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre.
Canvas is one of a handful of selected use case providers in the RBA eAUD project, alongside ANZ Bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and MasterCard.
“We’re a global fintech company that’s really building the infrastructure for the future of finance, that’s going digital using blockchain technology,” David told The AJN.
“It’s a secure environment for financial institutions, banks and governments, to transact with each other.”
David, who is a Moriah College alumnus, said Canvas is the “continuation of a 20-year journey with my brother”.
“Prior to Canvas we started one of Australia’s first fintechs called Pure Commerce – and it is still operating today,” he said.
“We started that in our grandmother’s garage and I joined straight out of Moriah. I joined my brother as an IT engineer and we built that business over the course of 13 years.
“In 2013 we sold that business to a Nasdaq-listed multi-billion dollar company called Euronet, that was one of the top fintech exits in Australia at the time.
That was a fantastic journey to go from grandma’s garage to being part of an American company.”
The Lavecky brothers are also passionate about giving back to the community and have been involved in the new Hakoah project at White City, which is expected to be completed later this year.
“We do a lot of work with the Hakoah project,” David said.
“We provided all of the infrastructure pro bono to support the initial membership campaign drive that kicked off last Rosh Hashanah. We dedicated resources from the team and helped them to get e-commerce – we’re very proud it handled and performed flawlessly.
“My brother Daniel recently joined the board of Hakoah and we see a lot of importance in Hakoah. I get a lot of nachas as well because of growing at Hakoah and going to bar mitzvahs.”
Daniel’s children attend Moriah while David’s are at Emanuel and David says he is looking forward to his daughter’s bat mitzvah hopefully being one of the first at Hakoah once it opens.
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