Billing Accuracy: Why I joined a Brazilian software company to run their North American expansion.

Billing Accuracy: Why I joined a Brazilian software company to run their North American expansion.

I met Almir Carrion at a track meet.

Not at a conference. Not through a warm intro from somebody’s fund. Our sons were friends, and we were two dads standing on the side of a track in Victoria watching them run. He’d brought his family over from São Paulo. I’d just come off 26 years of running my own company and I was, let’s say, between chapters.

People keep asking me how a guy on Vancouver Island ends up running North American operations for a Brazilian software company. So I finally wrote it out, and the answer is going to disappoint anybody hoping for a market-sizing story.

I said yes because of who Almir is.

What I was actually looking for

I’ll be honest about where my head was in 2024. I was tired. Not tired of working, I’ve never been tired of working. I was tired of rooms where everybody had a second reason for being there.

You know the feeling if you’ve had it. Every conversation has a subtitle, and you burn more energy working out what somebody actually wants than you spend on the thing you’re supposed to be building.

So I made myself a rule. Whatever I did next, I’d pick the people first and the opportunity second. That’s backwards from how business writing tells you to do it. I don’t care. I’d tried it the other way.

What Almir did

He told me the truth about things he didn’t have to tell me the truth about.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. When we started talking about what his company needed in North America, he told me what was working, then what wasn’t, then what he didn’t know yet. No version of events. No polish. When I asked something he couldn’t answer, he said so, and went and found out.

And his family was already here. He wasn’t pitching me a Canadian expansion from a boardroom in São Paulo. He was moving his life, which is about as hard a thing to fake as I can think of.

Look, I know how this sounds. A guy tells you he picked his job because the founder seemed nice. Maybe that’s naive. But I’ve watched more deals fall apart over hidden agendas than over bad markets, and I’d rather be wrong about a market.

Then I did my homework anyway

Liking someone isn’t a business case. So before I committed I went looking for people with no stake in whether I was right.

The premise I was testing was Almir’s, and it’s still the best line in this company. The bill is the most-opened message a business sends. Nobody signs up for it. Everybody opens it. And almost no one in marketing has ever looked at what’s inside.

In April 2025 I sat down with four people who’d know.

April 1. A former VP of Procurement at Rogers. Rogers came out of the Shaw deal running two billing systems, wireless and wireline, and building one view of a customer across them was hard. But the part that got me was smaller. He said a meaningful share of their data delays weren’t system failures at all. People just didn’t click approve. Somebody misread a commercial term. The automation was fine. The humans around it were the bottleneck, and nothing in the stack was built to noti

April 3. A former senior manager on the Rogers call centre side. I asked what customers actually phone in about. Taxes, partly. If your area code says Quebec and you live in Alberta, the tax can look wrong, and nothing on the statement explains why. So the customer calls. The rep explains it. Then some of them call again inside seven days, a number he tracked, because the explanation never made it onto the thing they’re holding. He also said Rogers had essentially no personalization in standard billing communications. Too many customers. Too general.

April 8. A VP of Customer Success for North America at Telus Health. He said something I’ve quoted about forty times since. With their legacy data, rebuilding a record from scratch is sometimes faster than cleaning the one you’ve got. Most statement errors, he said, come from billing data drifting out of line with what the contract actually says. Credits, consumption models, the one-off deals somebody soft-coded two years ago. Then a warning I took straight into how we sell: any project running past twelve months is at real risk of being cancelled.

April 19. A director of financial analysis at AT&T. He told me their CCM works. Upsell through billing communications is effective, installment plans that used to confuse people got clear, customers have warmed to automated interaction. I’m including him because it would be easy to leave him out. One of my four disagreed with my premise.

What that told me

Three of those four described a communications problem. Not one described a rendering problem.

Nobody said the bill looked bad. They said the number came from somewhere messy, or the reason behind it never got explained, or the data and the contract had quietly stopped agreeing. Which puts the fix upstream of every CCM platform on the Canadian shortlist. Those platforms take a number and make it beautiful. They don’t ask whether it’s right.

Brazil had already been forced to solve that end of it. The central bank issued Resolution 4549 on January 26, 2017, and from that April every card statement had to carry a customer-by-customer calculation the regulator could audit. Get it wrong and Bacen shows up. So the validation engine got built first and the communications layer went on top of clean data. Google Cloud published the numbers in its own case study: 16 billion data validations and more than 100 million documents in 2024, through Hiperstream.

I’d been asking whether the technology was real. It had been running Banco Carrefour’s card statements since 2009.

Then he made it weirder

A few months into working together, Almir said he thought we should acquire a company bigger than ours.

I said, really.

I’ve been called crazy a few times. But by then I’d stopped second-guessing what he told me, because he’d never given me a reason to, so I said let’s do it. Fast Movn took control of Hiperstream on February 27, 2026. Sixty-four million end users, more than ten billion validations a year, per the VIATEC announcement in March.

That’s the return on trusting someone. You move faster, because you’re not spending half the week decoding them.

Why any of this matters to you

The CCTS logged 23,647 telecom complaints in its annual report on January 14, 2026, and billing was 46 percent of the issues raised. On April 13, 2026 the CRTC issued 2026-67, and on April 24 it issued 2026-78. From April 2027 every provider in this country owes customers contract and promotion notices in their chosen channel, written confirmation of every self-service change, and a copy of all of it on file.

That’s a validation and communications mandate with a date on it. Canada is getting the forcing function Brazil got nine years ago, except the deadline is April 13, 2027, and a template migration on a legacy platform can eat the whole runway before anybody checks a single number.

So if you’re shortlisting a vendor this quarter, you’ll do the technical diligence. Everybody does. I’d say do the other kind too, because you’ll be on calls with these people for five years, and the reference check nobody runs is whether they’ll tell you what isn’t working.

If what those four told me sounds like your building, I’d like to hear it. And if you’d rather see a validated bill on your own data than listen to me describe one, Request a Demo (https://fastmovn.com/en/home/#request-a-demo).

Fast Movn is a Canadian technology company based in Vancouver, BC. Our platform pairs hiperValidation, which checks 100 percent of billing data before it reaches the customer, with hiperCCM, which turns the bill into a personalized, multichannel conversation. We work with telecom and financial services companies across Brazil and North America.

SOURCES

• Market validation interview, former VP Procurement, Rogers Communications, April 1, 2025 (Fast Movn internal record, name withheld).
• Market validation interview, former Senior Manager, Call Centre, Rogers Communications, April 3, 2025 (Fast Movn internal record, name withheld).
• Market validation interview, VP Customer Success North America, Telus Health, April 8, 2025 (Fast Movn internal record, name withheld).
• Market validation interview, Director Financial Analysis, AT&T, April 19, 2025 (Fast Movn internal record, name withheld).
• Banco Central do Brasil, Resolução 4.549, January 26, 2017, effective April 3, 2017. https://www.legisweb.com.br/legislacao/?id=359512
• Google Cloud, Hiperstream customer story (16 billion validations and more than 100 million documents in 2024). https://cloud.google.com/customers/intl/pt-br/hiperstream
• Hiperstream, clients page (Banco Carrefour since 2009). https://www.hiperstream.com/clientes/
• VIATEC, “Victoria tech company Fast Movn acquires controlling interest in Brazilian software platform Hiperstream,” March 31, 2026 (deal closed February 27, 2026; 64 million users; 10 billion validations a year). https://members.viatec.ca/news/Details/victoria-tech-company-fast-movn-acquires-controlling-interest-in-brazilian-software-platform-hiperstream-322517
• CCTS, “Telecom and TV Complaints Continue to Rise Across Canada: CCTS Annual Report,” January 14, 2026. https://www.ccts-cprst.ca/telecom-and-tv-complaints-continue-to-rise-across-canada-ccts-annual-report/
• CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-67, Enhancing customer notifications, April 13, 2026. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-67.htm
• CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-78, Enhancing self-service mechanisms, April 24, 2026. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-78.htm