Payments Canada, a non-profit organization that reports to the government, started laying the groundwork for the project, called the Real-Time Rail, in 2015 as part of anto modernize Canada’s financial plumbing for the digital age. The tech industry in particular welcomed the initiative, which it believes will drive innovation by making it easier and cheaper for fintechs and other companies to develop new services for consumers.
“My own personal opinion was it felt like there were benefits to some to slow it down,” said Dan Dickinson, a former Payments Canada board member who until last year was a senior executive at Equitable Bank, about the Real-Time Rail’s development. “The frustration is felt in pretty much every corner, except for the incumbents that have a solution in market.”
They settled on developing two new national systems: Lynx, an upgraded system for banks to use when paying one another, and the Real-Time Rail, which would allow companies of all stripes to process small payments on behalf of consumers. Payments Canada later outlined plans to replace the country’s retail batch-payment system, which settles smaller transactions like cheques and direct deposits by grouping them together in larger payments.
Unlike Canada’s other payments networks, however, the Real-Time Rail is a system meant to be used by a wide variety of companies. When it launches, startups and other businesses will want to plug into the network to move money around for customers. The major financial institutions have muted the competitive forces in the payments market as a result of their continued control over Payments Canada and InteracAccording to 11 people who have been involved with the modernization effort, this dynamic didn’t give the organization the independence it needed to pursue initiatives that ran contrary to the interests of Canada’s largest banks.
how canada is a world leader in cashless commerce you mean right?
Blackface Trudeau is too busy with gender pronouns.