North One // Eytan Bensoussan

I grew up in Montreal, the oldest of three children. My twin sisters arrived seven years after me, yet I never felt like an only child. Our house buzzed with inventions my father, a Moroccan-born professor of electrical engineering, tested in the basement. One week he built a thermostat that counted the people in a room and raised the heat on its own. The next week a robot tried to make my bed.
“My father lectured at McGill and later at École de technologie supérieure, a public research university. When the sun set, he turned into a historian. My father authored several sefarim on Tanach, tracing every nation it mentions and plotting how they traded and traveled.
“My mother was born in Montreal. Her Lithuanian and Polish family has been in Canada since the early 1800s. She kept our Ashkenazi-Sefardi kitchen humming even with circuits, satellites and half-finished gadgets scattered everywhere.
“That mix of tradition and curiosity shaped who I am. Today I live in North York, Toronto, with my wife and kids. The same wonder I felt watching my father’s prototypes now drives my work at North One, where I build banking tools smart enough to feel like the extra set of hands every small business needs.
“My mother was an elementary school English teacher. Money at home was comfortable enough although never extravagant. My father earned his steady professor salary and kept trying side companies; some worked, some flopped. We felt those swings, but I never felt we lacked for anything.
“I went to Solomon Schechter Academy for elementary and Herzliah for high school.
“I was entrepreneurial without knowing the word. At 15, I tutored classmates for $20 an hour and came up with a way to get more clients: I would give anyone who referred a student to me ten percent of whatever I earned from that student—forever. One month I cleared about $2,000 from biking house to house with a spreadsheet of commissions to pay off. When demand grew, I borrowed my friend’s father’s accounting-firm boardroom and gave a one-night physics crash course at $500 a seat.
“I read every book I could on builders like Bill Gates. As a teaching assistant I found another angle: grading. I paid my ten-year-old twin sisters three dollars an hour to mark every right answer with a red check so I could skim the wrong ones and still make $15 an hour. We finished 500 exams in a couple of hours.
“After college, I started at McGill University in biochemistry, added mathematics and a business minor, and even tried to create a new joint major called biochemistry and math. The committee said no, but the dean liked the idea and let me blend courses anyway. My father, who has a PhD, reminded me that a doctorate can lock you in a lab for ten years, so I moved on.
“After I finished my science degree at McGill, I enrolled in the school’s joint JD-MBA-law school. The first year of law nearly broke me. My marks landed in the bottom ten percent, numbers I had never seen in my life. I studied every night and every weekend, yet nothing clicked. I booked a meeting with the dean to quit. Sitting in his office, ready to hand in my notice, I realized I hated quitting even more than I hate failing. I told him I had come by mistake, walked out and resolved to grind it out on my own terms.
“I spent the next four years living in the library. Slowly, the marks rose. By graduation I was in the top 15 percent of the class, and I took the New York Bar just to finish the journey properly. I have never practiced law for even a single day, but the discipline of crawling out of that hole still shapes the way I work.
“I graduated at 26 and joined McKinsey as an associate. The job was simple to describe and hard to do: fly to a client anywhere in North America, take the problem that kept the chief executive up at night and solve it. Over the course of five years, I touched 17 or 18 industries. One week I was inside an aerospace plant, the next inside a nuclear reactor, then at a bank, an insurer or a pharmaceutical giant.
“On the industrial side, I spent months at a manufacturer that built passenger planes. They kept several billion dollars’ worth of raw materials on the floor, waiting for each aircraft to reach the next stage. We brought in line-balancing experts and rearranged the factory so four planes moved through the same steps in parallel. Inventory flowed instead of sitting, and the company freed up hundreds of millions of dollars that had been locked in rubber, wiring and sheet metal.
“At a nuclear site the problem was calendar risk. Every extra day of refurbishing the reactor cost a million dollars. We broke the overhaul into hundreds of steps, put numbers on each delay, and re-sequenced the critical path so the crew never waited for parts or permits. The lesson was always the same: a clear map of where money and time leak out lets you plug the holes.
“Working with all these different companies, I realized something. They all had issues with their financing department—specifically, that their banking was complicated and costing them too much in fees.
“One company spent $80 million a year to run its finance department and could not understand why. We dug through the invoices and found two million a month in bank fees. Over decades, each regional manager had walked into the nearest branch and opened a small business account. The firm ended up with dozens of mismatched accounts built for retail customers, each costing them five, ten or 30 dollars every time they crossed a limit. They also ran 15 different accounting systems, one per region, and needed 50 people just to stitch their numbers together. We mapped every charge, closed the useless accounts, moved them to a master structure and showed where automation could take over.
“Those years planted the seed for my company, North One. Big companies could pay consultants and software vendors to tame their back-office chaos. The plumber, the food truck owner and the e-commerce startup could not. I left McKinsey convinced that small businesses deserved the same tools, only simpler and cheaper. The rest of my story builds on that idea.
“I kept spotting the same waste over and over. Big companies were spending a fortune just to keep their finance engine running, and it all started with the wrong kind of bank accounts. Picture an elephant trying to fit into a dog cage. When the fit was bad, the banks piled on fees for every little thing and hid them inside the monthly statements instead of sending clear invoices.