Anthony de Gale

An operator who advises, not a consultant who has only ever advised.

Why this work

Why this work

Origins

I started in banking, as a teller. A few years on an FX desk, then commercial credit lending. The journey teaches you a particular discipline. When the numbers do not close, you go looking for why. I have carried that lens through thirty years in payments, and it still shapes how I read the industry.

For most of those years, payments sat quietly in the back office. A cost to be managed, a function to hand to the bank. That has changed. Payments now touches growth, margin, fraud exposure, and increasingly, how prepared a company is for the way AI is reshaping commerce. Most mid-market companies have not caught up to the shift. Their banks and vendors will help, but they carry their own agendas, and those do not always serve yours.

What I provide is the opposite. Independent advice, with no product to sell and no agenda of my own.

That includes time at TD Bank, Bell Nexxia, Global Payments, and PSiGate -- banking, telecom, and payments, in that order. It's why I work vendor-agnostic: I'm not selling a platform, I'm looking for where the hidden friction sits before it becomes embedded cost.

That gap is where I work. I advise finance and operations leaders at companies between $20M and $500M in revenue. Large enough that payments decisions carry real weight, and not yet large enough to have a dedicated payments leader in the room.

I am also writing a book on where payments, AI, and agentic commerce meet. It is the longer argument behind the shorter pieces I publish here.

How I work

How I work

Payments are not plug and play. The work is research and clear guidance. Where it helps, I stay on through implementation so the project reaches completion rather than stalling halfway.

Associations and Memberships

  • The Canadian Black Chamber of Commerce
  • Treasury Management Association
  • The Holt xChange
  • The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada)
  • Agentics Foundation – Toronto Chapter