About us

Everyone deserves to be treated fairly.

In 2012, I starting a 2 year consultation working with lenders, debt charities, and collection agencies to look at how to increase earlier engagement, capture a more accurate affordability assessment and build fair and transparent resolutions that helped both the consumer and a business 

Using the research captured, in 2016 we built the first UK digital engagement and affordability solution with two high street banks. The aim was to reduce the time to capture and complete an assessment from 45 mins to 5 mins and reduce operational costs by 90%.

in 2018 we came to Canada as we saw a country that needed help. Bringing all our experience in digital transformation, credit, risk, payments and collections we developed a leading digital engagement and payment platform called SWIPE.

This software combined with our best practice advice has helped Canadian businesses embrace digital solutions to increase their efficiency and effectiveness to reduce costs, increase engagement, assess risk or gain payment. We offer a full end to end consultation to benchmark your business against best practice and design a roadmap to help you reach your goals.

In November 2024, we launched SmartI&e for Canada, our flagship software that enables a business to capture and understand consumer affordability. Smarti&e (Smart Income and expenditure) enables a consumer to share up to 12 months of banking information to prove their income and expenditure. Using our ‘True Affordability’ AI we are able to categorise over thousands of banking transactions into a simple report to show income, essential and non-essential expenditure.

Today, credit reports alone cannot determine consumer affordability. With over 50% of Canadian families struggling to pay bills and manage debt SmartI&e is the first solution to use open finance data in Canada to help lenders, utilities, housing, debt advice, insolvency and collections.
Smarti&e is also open banking ready and Breathe TCS works with the OFN Board (Open Finance Network) and integrators who are working with the major banks to build the APIs.

But this is just the beginning. .At Breathe we are engaged with the government and regulators to build a new ecosystem for Canada. One that ensures a consumer with or without a credit file is treated fairly and those deemed as vulnerable are also recognised and managed with care.

Simon Howard is a financial services strategist with over 25 years of experience in credit, risk, payments, collections, and digital engagement across the UK, Europe, and North America.

Simon works with banks, utilities, lenders, fintechs, and government organisations to help them modernise customer engagement, improve affordability assessment, and apply digital transformation and AI to deliver better outcomes for both businesses and consumers.

His work combines data, behavioural science, artificial intelligence, and financial insight to help organisations move from reactive collections and manual affordability processes to proactive, intelligent customer support and risk management.