Weekly Regional Business Intelligence | | | Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | | | Jamie Crich and the late Karen Crich announced as 2026 inductees into the London and District Business Hall of Fame Junior Achievement South Western Ontario has announced this year’s laureates to be inducted into the JA London and District Business Hall of Fame. Each year, in recognition of outstanding contributions and ethics in business, Hall of Fame laureates are nominated and selected by respected members of the London and area business community. Jamie Crich and the late Karen Crich of Auburn Group were announced as the 2026 laureates at a presentation on Wednesday at RBC Place London. The 2026 inductees will be formally honoured at the 36th Annual London and District Business Hall of Fame Gala on Thursday, October 22, 2026, at RBC Place London. The evening will celebrate their achievements and the lasting impact they have had on the business community and beyond. Funds from the event will benefit the work of Junior Achievement South Western Ontario, bringing relevant hands-on learning to local students. The upshot: Joining their father, Auburn Group founder Don Crich, as Business Hall of Fame laureates (he was inducted posthumously in 2016), the brother-sister Crich duo have helped shape Southwestern Ontario landscape through decades of vision, hard work and service. Jamie Crich, president of Auburn Group, has played a leading role in growing the family business into one of Southwestern Ontario’s most established real estate development, homebuilding and property management companies. Guided by a commitment to thoughtful design, environmental responsibility and long-term value creation, Jamie has helped shape communities across the region while maintaining Auburn Group’s reputation as a trusted developer and long-term owner. Karen Crich, who passed suddenly and unexpectedly in 2021 at the age of 52, was a driving force behind Auburn Group’s success, bringing exceptional financial expertise, leadership and creativity to the organization. A graduate of Western University and a chartered accountant, she was involved in every aspect of the business, from condominium development and property management to financing, contract negotiations and project design. Karen was also known for her creative vision, which can be seen in projects such as The Barrel Yards, Arrow Lofts and Proof Kitchen at the Delta Waterloo Hotel. Her commitment to community service included serving on the Fanshawe board of directors and helping establish the school’s Don Crich Skilled Trades Accelerator program. Through her leadership, generosity, and dedication to education, Karen left a lasting impact on both the industry and the community she served. Read more: JA South Western Ontario | | | Paystone seeks creditor protection Local fintech firm Paystone is entering creditor protection, citing a $92-million debt load. In court filings, the payment processing company is claiming $50.6 million in assets and $117.9 million in liabilities, and is proposing a restructuring that will see the firm bought by a numbered corporation controlled by Tarique Al-Ansari and Abdullah Saab, the co-founders of Paystone, which will reportedly bring its debt load down to $60 million. The company says the restructuring of the company’s finances and debt isn’t expected to have any impact on its 118 employees (which include 50 based in London). “The CCAA filing is not the result of any material issues with our underlying business performance,” Al-Ansari told The London Free Press. “Business continues without interruption. Our team remains in place, we continue to serve our clients, and we’re paying for all goods and services in the ordinary course. It’s business as usual. It’s not impacting the operation.” The upshot: Al-Ansari is putting a positive spin on things, but the news marks a sharp about-face for a company that had previously been regarded as a rising star in the Canadian tech space. Paystone went on an aggressive acquisition tear in the early 2020s, buying firms like DataCandy, NXGEN Canada, NiceJob and Canadian Payment Services. Details reported by Insolvency Insider raise more questions about what has gone on at Paystone over the last few years. According to the trade publication, creditor Sandton Investments bought the company’s senior debt from its original creditors in early May. It also noted that Paystone’s liquidity became strained after a “billing error” in April 2025 “which overcharged a significant number of customers by a factor of 100,” an incident that the company said in court documents caused “customer losses, reputational damage, remediation costs and defaults under its senior credit arrangement.” Insolvency Insider also suggested the company had a number of “uncompleted U.S. transactions” that had strained its finances before the billing error as well, suggesting that perhaps it had attempted to make further acquisitions that fell through. It sounds mostly like Paystone ran into trouble as it tried to scale up quickly — in the past, Al-Ansari had not been shy about its goal to be the first London company to reach “unicorn” status — so it will be interesting to what their trajectory looks like from here. Read more: London Free Press | Insolvency Insider | | | Hitachi Energy acquires Canduct Group Hitachi Energy, a Swiss subsidiary of the Japanese Hitachi Group, announced this week it is buying London’s Canduct Group, a manufacturer of transformer insulation kits that employs more than 300 people at its Blakie Road facility (pictured). Hitachi Energy said it will also be building a 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Huron Industrial Park, which they expect to create around 100 or so jobs. Construction is set to begin later this year. A Hitachi Energy Canada director said of Canduct: “They’ve been established for more than 40 years, they’re an integral part of the supply chain and we have worked with them for more than 20 years. This is the next step.” The company also said the demand for transformers “has increased dramatically, [and] the supply chain for transformers and insulation is scarce.” A purchase price was not disclosed. The upshot: As countries race to electrify more and more of the power grid, companies like the Canduct Group — likely not a household name for many Londoners — suddenly become valuable acquisition targets for large firms like Hitachi, a $133-billion global conglomerate. “There is a lot more demand expected, and we need transformers and insulation for them,” said Hitachi Energy Canada managing director Carla Vicente. “This investment is about adding capacity in the region.” Hitachi’s CEO of business unit transformers Bruno Melles said that “by acquiring Canduct Group, we are expanding regional capabilities, strengthening supply chains for insulation kits and components, and supporting the growing demand for electrification across the region.” Kapil Lakhotia of the London Economic Development Corp. added that “these types of investments will help diversify our local economy, create new jobs and innovation and build a sustainable future.” Read more: Hitachi Energy | London Free Press | | | London rents hit three-year low London’s rent prices are continuing their downward trend, reaching a three-year low, according to the latest rentals.ca report. The asking price for a one-bedroom apartment in the city is now $1,665, with two-beds going for around $2,050. StatsCan put out its own numbers last week as well, which told roughly the same story — it put the average asking rents for a one bedroom at $1,560, and two-bedrooms apartments at $1,930. “Those trends are happening in many markets in Ontario, markets like London, Windsor, Kitchener, Hamilton, Guelph,” said Statistics Canada’s Centre for Housing and Income Statistics assistant director Jean-Philippe Deschamps-Laporte, speaking to The London Free Press. He points out that market dynamics have mostly inverted from the frothy post-Covid days. “You have good numbers in construction and lower population growth, which makes the marketplace a little bit different.” The Rentals.ca report largely concurred, noting that “[the] combination of new supply being completed in a market with receding demand has led to persistently declining rents and increased competition between property owners, particularly in the largest urban markets.” The upshot: The update is saying the same thing the reports have been indicating for the last few months: Rent is still expensive (even three-year lows are above historical norms) — it’s just getting slightly less expensive each month, and there’s not a tremendous amount of movement in the market. The three-year window being talked about also still includes some of the most expensive years of the post-Covid rental market, which flatters the comparison somewhat, but does suggest the combination of construction, population contraction and lower overall demand is bringing prices down, even if affordability remains a challenge. Nationally, more expensive areas are starting to moderate, historically cheaper areas are starting to see prices edge up. With a number of high-unit rental projects still underway in London (and a boatload of approved projects waiting in the wings), rent contraction is likely what we’ll be seeing for the next little while. Read more: StatsCan | London Free Press | Rentals.ca | | | interVal releases personal tax product interVal, a local SaaS provider for wealth firms, accounting firms and financial institutions, has launched a personal tax product for wealth advisors called interval Personal Tax, the company announced this week. The firm, which has largely focused on tools to manage the assets of business owners, says that this new tool is aimed at automating large parts of the wealth management process when working with client’s personal data. “For Canadian wealth advisors, a client’s annual tax return is one of the most information-rich documents they handle, and one of the least leveraged,” the company said. “Manually reviewing T1s for RRSP and TFSA room, income splitting opportunities, capital gains positioning and year-over-year trends takes hours per clients. […] interVal Personal Tax changes that.” Trevor Greenway, co-founder of interVal, said that the new tool “puts that intelligence in advisors’ hands in minutes, not hours, so they can walk into every review with the context they need.” The upshot: This looks like a careful AI play by interVal, coming at a time when frontier AI companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) are aggressively pushing tools out that have a finance and tax focus. The language used — or not used, as it were — is interesting: interVal isn’t that explicit about the AI-ness of it (they included in a press email that the reports were AI-written), and are focused more on the idea that this technology isn’t a replacement for a financial advisor, but a value enhancer. “interVal Personal Tax is a continuation in interVal’s mission to empower advisors with actionable insights, helping them guide their clients toward long-term success,” the company said. Read more: Fintech.ca | | | City scrambles to apply for provincial-federal DC program City politicians quickly passed a motion to apply to the federal Development Charge Reduction program on Wednesday, just before a Friday deadline to apply to the program. At a special sitting of council, councillors approved a staff recommendation to cut development charges by up to half, meeting a requirement from the province and federal government to be eligible for money from the $8.8-billion program, which would (theoretically) replace the lost revenue from DCs used to fund infrastructure build out. Beyond that, much of what the program or the city’s application will look like remains vague, a point made by both Councillor Sam Trosow and mayoral candidate Councillor Susan Stevenson, the latter of whom complained about the vagueness of the application. “Somebody is guiding this ship, and I thought it was going to be council,” she said at the meeting. The mayor and city staff’s position was that the city isn’t committing to anything yet, and will have an opportunity in August to vote on whether to approve or reject the funding partnership agreement with upper levels of government. Both Jared Zaifman of the London Home Builders’ Association and Mike Wallace of the London Development Institute gave their support to the program, with the latter calling on the city to “maximize the opportunity this program offers to reduce development charges, lower the cost of new homes and improve housing affordability.” The upshot: For a program that is relatively simple — cut development charges in the name of spurring construction and bringing down costs, and upper levels of government will plug the hole that creates in the municipal budget — it hasn’t been a masterclass in governmental cooperation or clarity. City politicians and staff still don’t seem to have full knowledge of what kind of deals the provincial and federal governments are going to be willing to cut with them (and city staff note that one major risk of this plan is that the city doesn’t get made completely whole if the cuts to DCs exceed how much they get from upper levels of government). Also unclear is what the city wants to actually fund through this program. “Nothing has been really decided on at this point,” the mayor said after the council meeting. “I’ve seen what [city staff] might be contemplating, but I don’t know what they’re ultimately going to apply for because they’ve got to make the application as competitive as possible.” While part of this falls on the city, part of it also falls on the province and feds, who only opened applications for the program two weeks ago, and (judging from some comments made by city staff) weren’t entirely clear on some of the technical details. We’ll likely have to wait a couple more weeks to see what the city’s application ends up looking like. Read more: CTV News London | London Free Press | | | Dispatch: June 19, 2026 A summary of recent business appointments and announcements, plus event listings for the upcoming week. View listings here | | | | |