Canada’s payments ecosystem is at a pivotal stage of transformation. The journey toward simplification and modernisation is accelerating, with efforts such as the introduction of Real-Time Rail (RTR) and increased regulatory oversight reshaping the landscape. This impending change will greatly impact the nation’s financial services industry, which is anchored by five dominant banks that control over 90% of the country’s total banking assets and financial services market share.
Despite their historical strength and resilience – particularly during periods of global financial stress – Canadian banks now face major technical challenges. Legacy infrastructure and fragmented data environments are increasingly at odds with the growing demand for faster, more transparent, and more secure payment experiences. At the same time, traditional financial institutions must navigate these pressures while contending with broader economic headwinds.
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A moment of change
Now, under new mandates such as the Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA), the Bank of Canada has begun registering payment service providers (PSPs), a shift that brings these players under formal oversight for the first time, enabling them to build trust, scale with more confidence and gain direct access to core payment systems. This levelling of the regulatory playing field is expected to increase market participation and foster healthy competition alongside traditional banks.
As the high-value and real-time payment rails continue to evolve under regulatory oversight, institutions are under pressure to modernise both operationally and technologically. They’re actively exploring new infrastructure, data capabilities and monitoring tools to support this shift. This is a crucial moment for Canadian banks to strengthen their operational readiness, not just to meet evolving expectations but to lead in a real-time economy. The momentum is here, both in regulation and innovation. Now, it’s about execution.
Pillars of payments modernisation: Building resilience across the stack
As Canada moves toward a real-time financial ecosystem, resilience has become a strategic priority — not just a compliance checkbox. Institutions today must approach resilience as a multi-layered strategy across business, operational and technical domains. These layers are interconnected: technology provides the foundation, operations drive execution and business resilience is the ultimate goal.
Business resilience: Ensuring continuity of critical operations
At the top of the stack, business resilience is about safeguarding critical services and customer commitments, particularly during times of stress. According to the Bank of Canada’s Operational Resilience and Operational Risk Management Guideline, Canadian institutions are now expected to identify their most essential business functions, define impact tolerances and establish plans to maintain service delivery. Payments Canada has reinforced this focus through high-availability investments, such as the launch of a secondary data centre for Lynx, the country’s high-value payment system.
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By GlobalDataOperational resilience: Responding, recovering and adapting in real time
Additionally, operational resilience now focuses on how effectively institutions can respond, recover and adapt to disruptions, ideally before customers even notice. This requires smarter monitoring, real-time alerting and a tighter grip on third-party risk. With PSPs and cloud providers looking set to play a larger role in Canada’s financial ecosystem, ensuring oversight across the entire service chain is more important than ever.
Technical resilience: The infrastructure beneath it all
Finally, technical resilience underpins everything else. Canadian banks are under pressure to modernise decades-old infrastructure to meet the expectations of a 24/7 economy. Systems must not only perform at scale, but be tested, secure and adaptable. With the Real-Time Rail on the horizon, the need for infrastructure that is robust, flexible and deeply observable will only grow.
By viewing resilience as a layered, interconnected capability and not a siloed requirement, Canada’s financial institutions can better navigate the demands of modernisation, regulation and customer trust.
From reactive to proactive: The next frontier in Canadian banking
In a real-time payments environment, being reactive is no longer enough. As transaction volumes increase and customer expectations for instant service rise, banks must anticipate issues before they escalate. This requires visibility, traceability, and speed — not just in payment processing, but in how institutions manage exceptions, compliance, and customer service. Canadian financial institutions have an opportunity to lead by embedding proactivity deep into their operational DNA.
Canada’s move toward real-time infrastructure introduces not only new opportunities but also a new set of security and fraud prevention challenges that demand proactive strategies. With standards like ISO 20022 unlocking richer data formats, financial institutions can now access and act on granular transaction data to identify friction points and anomalies. This not only reduces risk but also enhances trust and efficiency.
For some context, investigating a single lost payment can cost a bank as much as $250–$300, and with the volume of transactions increasing, these costs can quickly spiral without the right monitoring tools. Transaction management platforms can address this challenge by enabling financial institutions to access and monitor payment flows across systems in real time, regardless of format or platform. These solutions typically provide two core capabilities:
- Real-time accessibility of transaction data to support instant decision-making.
- Track and Trace functionality offers end-to-end visibility, proactive alerts for delayed or failed payments, and a clear view of what’s at stake – before a customer even needs to call.
In turn, this approach can prevent up to 500,000 payment-related calls per bank annually, delivering a measurable impact on cost, service quality and customer experience. On the compliance front, these tools can also support regulatory reporting needs. Ultimately, in a world where milliseconds matter, layered capabilities like dynamic anomaly detection and early fraud alerting are no longer optional — they are essential. For Canadian financial institutions, there’s now an imperative to assess what systems best meet their needs.
The road ahead: Moving from awareness to action
As Canada modernises its payments infrastructure, the opportunity is clear: shift from reaction to readiness. Canadian financial institutions that invest now in operational visibility and resilience will not only meet regulatory expectations — they’ll lead in customer trust, competitive performance, and help shape a stronger, more agile financial ecosystem for Canada’s real-time future.
Erik De Belder is Director of Americas & UK at Intix
