Robert Leaker is the Chief Compliance Officer of Apaylo Finance Technology Inc, a Canadian electronic payment service provider. Earlier this summer Robert reached out to Queen’s School of Computing to share what he referred to as an “amazing experience” working with a QSC student.
Adam Clarke was in his second year studying computer science when he got hired by Apaylo Finance Technology Inc for a short contract. At the time Adam was hired, Apaylo was using the Zoho mailing platform to send out ledgers of accounts to over 100 merchants daily. Due to the volume of merchants, the task of sending a separate ledger to each individual recipient was taking the team about two, two-and-a-half hours of extra work. Robert Leaker was looking to automate this task and asked Adam if he could help.
Adam took on that task and was able to come up with the required script. In order to do that he had to learn the Zoho programming language called Deluge. Robert Leaker said, “I was pretty impressed when Adam, who had never been exposed to this programming language, figured it out and came up with a script, and then did a YouTube video to show me and my team how to use it. We were able to operationalize Adam’s script and it now saves one person’s entire afternoon of work. Our company does 4 billion a year in transactions, but we only have about 12 staff. So the fact that we can free up somebody’s afternoon goes a long way in helping us focus on value added work and on business development.”
This is not Adam’s first experience with billing systems. Over the summer of 2022, Adam participated in the Build2Scale program ran by the Dunin-Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre. Build2Scale is a part-time accelerator program for entrepreneurs looking to innovate in the health sector. As part of the program, Adam co-founded and developed Verus Billing, an automated medical billing system that takes physician input and instantly generates billing codes. The company’s aim is to help physicians spend less time on billing, see more patients and earn more money.
Robert concluded our call by saying he would be happy to recommend Adam to any future employer.
“Adam is a very genuine human being,” he said. “I hope that that is representative of the kind of students that you’re turning out. He understood the problem and took it upon himself to find the solution for it. And that’s exactly what we needed.”