Michael Gokturk and the promise behind a payment

Before the furniture comes off the truck, somebody has to pay. That was one of Michael Gokturk’s useful observations about the payments business. Movers adopted Payfirma’s mobile application early because a confirmed card payment settled a practical question at a customer’s front door. A sofa is considerably harder to repossess once it has made itself comfortable in the living room.

Williams Moving & Storage was an early customer, and its referrals helped bring in other moving businesses. The appeal was ordinary and immediate: take the payment where the work happens. Gokturk had found a way into an industry by paying attention to people whose offices had wheels.

For a time, that talent for spotting an awkward transaction defined his public career. He helped build Versapay, took it to the public markets, and launched Payfirma. He talked about replacing queues with mobile checkout and making payment information easier for merchants to understand. Later, at Einstein Exchange, the question of what happened after customers handed over their money became central to a much darker chapter.

In February 2026, Gokturk entered a securities regulatory settlement accepting responsibility for fraud by the Einstein corporations. The agreement also expressly recorded that he did not misappropriate funds, speculate with customers’ funds or benefit from the misconduct. Both parts belong in his story. The early products and the later responsibility are attached to the same name.

A banker steps behind the counter

Gokturk’s route into payments ran through economics and investment banking. He studied economics at the University of Calgary from 1995 to 1999, earning a BA, then worked in investment banking and corporate finance at PI Financial. His working life began around capital and financing before he started building businesses that dealt with the everyday movement of money.

Versapay was the first major expression of that move. Gokturk was its co-founder and founding CEO, alongside co-founder Kevin Short. The business developed in Vancouver in the mid-2000s, offering merchants ways to accept electronic payments. Its early proposition covered business and consumer transactions, with Chase Paymentech among its early partners.

The industry involved a surprisingly physical assortment of objects: card terminals, wires, wireless devices, cards in customers’ pockets. An electronic payment could still demand a fairly conspicuous piece of furniture on the shop counter. Versapay supplied wired and wireless point-of-sale terminals as well as integrated and online payment services. This was a business built around getting a purchase completed.

Growth brought attention. Versapay ranked first on Profit’s 2009 Hot 50 list. Its shares began trading on the TSX Venture Exchange on January 20, 2010, under the symbol VPY. Gokturk had moved from helping finance other companies to leading one into the public market.

That chapter ended quickly. By August 2010, Versapay was announcing an arrangement with its founder and former CEO. The company acknowledged his role in building the business and taking it public. He would pursue other opportunities. Payfirma soon became the next one.

The cash register goes visiting

Payfirma launched in early 2011, with Gokturk and Sunan Spriggs building a company around payment acceptance across mobile devices, websites and stores. The phone offered a particularly direct opportunity. Merchants already carried one. Giving it a card reader meant payments could follow the merchant outside the shop.

The early mobile offering included an application and swiper for iPhone and BlackBerry. Payfirma described itself as the first company to launch that combination in Canada. Plumbers, musicians, artists and service businesses were among the customers it sought. These were businesses for which the traditional fixed checkout could be an expensive answer to a question nobody had asked.

Gokturk’s ambition was broader than moving the terminal. “My mandate is to get rid of lineups forever,” he said in 2013. He imagined retail staff checking customers out wherever they stood in a store. His reference point was the Apple shopping experience: a sale could finish beside the product, without a ceremonial journey to a cash desk.

He was also building a place for the information to go. Payfirma brought transactions from different payment channels into one system. The benefit for a merchant was partly acceptance and partly administration. After making a sale, somebody still needed to know which channel it came through and how it fitted with the rest of the business.

“We are here to make it simple, transparent, and personable.”

Michael Gokturk / Payfirma

In May 2014, Payfirma announced a multi-year partnership with Vancouver Whitecaps FC as its official payment-processing technology provider. The company had moved from winning individual merchants to working with a recognizable sporting organization. Its revenues had risen from $1.5 million in 2011 to just under $8 million in 2013. Those figures describe the company’s business, rather than Gokturk’s personal wealth.

The office borrows from the classroom

Some of Gokturk’s ideas about running Payfirma came from a less obvious place than a bank. While at Versapay, he spoke with colleagues whose children attended Montessori schools. Their accounts of the children’s independence and creativity interested him enough to study whether those methods could apply to adults at work.

At Payfirma, new employees were encouraged to explore the company’s systems through use. People were hired into particular jobs, but Gokturk wanted them to discover problems, criticize weaknesses and suggest improvements. Participation in the mobile app’s interface extended beyond the people whose formal roles involved designing it. A sales job did not automatically disqualify someone from noticing an awkward screen.

That approach gave his management philosophy a specific texture. He described wanting employees to develop into responsibilities they enjoyed, with room to guide their own learning. The office had acquired something of a classroom’s permission to experiment. Whether an idea came from technical support or a more senior desk mattered less than whether it improved the product.

By May 2015, he was also willing to describe a management regret. Speaking with Cheryl Draper at Startup Grind Vancouver, he said he wished he had concentrated on company culture earlier. He connected the ability to attract people with the values and daily experience inside the business. It was a more reflective answer than a product demonstration could provide.

Mentorship belonged to that same public account of entrepreneurship. He said he continued to seek mentors and encouraged others to ask for help directly. At the time, his activities also included angel investing, mentoring and a place on the National Board of Advisors for The Next Big Thing Foundation. The founder who offered advice was still presenting himself as someone who needed it.

Eventually, the banks became customers

Payfirma’s next stage required money and distribution. In May 2015, it announced a $13 million Series A financing led by Dundee Capital Markets. The intended uses included expanding products, pursuing partnerships and hiring. A mobile reader could win a transaction; a broader company needed the people and relationships to support many more of them.

Recognition followed that autumn, when Payfirma received the Canadian FinTech Awards’ FinTech Company of the Year award. The company’s message increasingly concerned a connected payment system, with transaction information collected in one place. Its product ambitions extended beyond the first card swipe.

In June 2017, Payfirma launched a white label version of PayHQ. Financial institutions could put their own identity on the platform and offer merchant services under their brands. Payfirma supplied the technology; the bank or credit union supplied a relationship its business customers already knew.

Canadian Western Bank was a partner, and Payfirma had been working with CIBC since 2014. The platform brought together payment acceptance and tools such as invoicing and recurring billing. Gokturk now described bank collaboration as central to growth and product development. The practical question had become how to get the software into more merchants’ hands.

In February 2018, Merrco acquired Payfirma, which became its wholly owned subsidiary. The business Gokturk had founded had entered another ownership chapter. His own attention had already extended into cryptocurrency.

The promise attached to a deposit

The Einstein corporations were incorporated in British Columbia in 2017. Gokturk was their sole director and a public face of the platform, which let customers buy, sell and store cryptocurrency. He and others ran it together. It offered another version of an appealing financial proposition: make a complicated activity approachable through software.

In April 2019, Einstein announced that its new mobile applications had added more than 60,000 customers within two weeks. Those were the company’s own figures. Its announcement emphasized mobile access, referrals and a larger customer base. Read beside the eventual outcome, the announcement shows how little a count of new accounts can say about what is happening to the assets behind them.

By November 2019, a court-appointed interim receiver was seeking to preserve the platform’s assets. The Einstein corporations were dissolved in 2020 without assets. A business promoted around access to digital money had left customers facing the far more familiar problem of money they could not recover.

What the settlement established

On February 27, 2026, Gokturk agreed to pay the British Columbia Securities Commission $1 million and accepted permanent market restrictions, including a prohibition on acting as a director or officer of an issuer or registrant. Limited exceptions permit personal investing through specified accounts. These restrictions materially change the picture of a career once described through successive company launches.

The settlement established that the Einstein corporations committed fraud by using customer deposits in ways inconsistent with their promises of safe storage and trading. Deposits went into corporate bank accounts and wallets on third-party platforms; customer assets also funded operations and other customers’ withdrawals. Gokturk’s responsibility arose because he directed, authorized or acquiesced in the corporations’ misconduct.

The agreement separately stated that he had not misappropriated funds, made speculative investments with customers’ money or benefited from the misconduct. He had contributed about $1 million of his own money to fund the platform and return some funds to users. He also had no previous securities disciplinary history. These particulars are essential to understanding the outcome fairly.

The proceedings were discontinued on March 2, 2026, following the settlement. That is the latest decisive public development in this account. Gokturk’s career contains useful inventions, willing customers, experiments in management and a formal acceptance of responsibility. It began by making a payment easier to take. Its later chapter shows why the obligations attached to that payment remain after the screen says the transaction is complete.