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Michelle Winsor

Accelera Business Solutions is a Canadian women-owned and led organization. I am deeply passionate about scaling our organization in a diversified way, with continued attention to women, underrepresented groups, and youth. Our clients are also an underrepresented group, with our attention to credit unions, mid to small businesses, and mid-sized financial services organizations.

Our team’s number one goal is to maintain an innovative and flexible mindset. This has resulted in products and services that make an impact because they are accessible and affordable and address the growing demand for more digital services in this market. Today we have created products such as a DIY Merger Tool and a Partner Ecosystem with a design studio we call Maestro. Our services are offered on a fractional basis to keep it affordable and easy to integrate consulting talent alongside their teams. We are even exploring the Metaverse!

Tell us about yourself?

As an innovative entrepreneur, visionary, thinking partner, and advisor, I have been relentlessly pursuing my dream of breaking down barriers to employment, growth in business and access to affordable technology. I am passionate about inclusivity and fair competition.

After consulting for some of the largest financial companies in North America, I founded Accelera; a company that aims to revolutionize the financial world. Accelera is my embodied passion to make technology flexible and accessible to businesses of all sizes. I believe in the power of creating an inclusive ecosystem of people, communities, and businesses through the collective will of organizations that have the desire to grow and build together for the future.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Don’t take it personally. Everyone must do what they need to do to make all of you successful. I have learned that this is a business and that I need to balance work and life, which is hard under normal circumstances. As a founder, everything you have is going into your business, whether it be the relationships within the business, your personal relationships, or your financial relationships. Looking after your health and your well-being should be your highest priority. Everyone is relying on you to stay hyper-focused, but everyone else’s success within your company is not just your accountability.

What problem does your business solve?

ACCELERA

Let’s face it, there are a lot of solutions out there, but very few companies large enough to access them. We know this is an issue, especially as consumer demand for digital has grown. Over 65 per cent of customers are now expecting the businesses they interact with will understand their digital needs and be able to address them. If technology isn’t accessible or affordable, it drives the need to aggregate services, amalgamate, or in the worst cases, even close their doors. We are determined to change this through our mandate that our products and services must be accessible and affordable. We are laser-focused on the market below large enterprises.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

I grew frustrated knowing that credit unions and small businesses could not easily and affordably access tools that would help their innovation and scale at the rate technology was changing. Simple things like marketplaces were coming out, but the ability to participate required an economy of scale that meant they could not access the solutions. Accelera was born by exploring ways to make this more accessible to clients. We’ve certainly gone through a lot of trials and errors around affordability versus the amount of effort needed to keep it affordable. We have recently decided to focus on credit unions and brokers at this stage of our growth. This way, we can offer innovation in areas such as mergers and acquisitions, the upgrading of partnerships and systems, and the future state of open finance.

What is your magic sauce?

How many women have you met within the financial sector who are founders of a technical back-end system? I’m growing a network of like-minds and would love to meet them. But that aside, I feel that we are laser-focused on our market. This means keeping things affordable and functional for SMEs to incorporate into their businesses so that they can remain unique yet part of a global community. Our objectives have always been along this line, and we are committed to exploring the products and services this community needs access to and determining if we have the capability to solve their needs.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

Our vision is to be the Go-To Ecosystem for SMEs to gain access to technologies and partnerships that are fit-for-size and budget, intuitive, and easy to use. When we say Ecosystem, that means an Ecosystem of partners, clients, and talent; basically, anything that can solve these problems for small to medium enterprises so that they can keep up with the ever-changing digital trends. It also means we can’t do it alone and are always looking for collaborators who have a similar vision.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Finding the appropriate balance of resources and skills while aligning our values with the parts of the community we want to involve. We’ve worked hard at building a team that is dedicated to not only our success but the success of the clients we work with. As we worked with clients, we also gained clarity around our products, and we’ve had to rethink both how we approached our mission along with the products themselves.

How can people get involved?

As we’re continuously trying to grow our ecosystem and our products, we’re looking for companies with an innovative mindset and are willing to explore ways to automate complex problems such as mergers and acquisitions, shifts to open finance and what that might mean to them. We’re happy to host workshops to bring their team along and build out potential use cases. We also love to be helping hands to gain familiarity and comfort in developing your strategy and how you might implement it. We are also always interested in technologies that we would like to explore being part of an Ecosystem.

You can call us at 236-232-2173 or email us at info@acceleraecosystem.com. We would love to see you on LinkedIn @AcceleraEcosystem, too! www.linkedin.com/company/38097536/admin