Most Canadians never think about what happens when they tap to pay. The money moves, the coffee is handed over, and the moment dissolves into the rhythm of the day. That simplicity rests on something easy to take for granted: a domestic payment network, built over 40-plus years, that moves money securely and keeps core financial infrastructure in Canadian hands.
Consider the alternative. Without a domestic network, the rails behind everyday transactions would be owned and governed beyond a country’s borders, subject to another jurisdiction’s rules and pricing. As new forms of money, geopolitical instability, and AI reshape how payments work, the question of who controls those rails has moved to the centre of a global conversation. More countries are asking what it means to build vibrant, sovereign digital economies that are open, interoperable, and grounded in trust—and what’s at stake for those that don’t.
The United Kingdom is one of those countries. Through the National Payments Vision, a government-led effort to modernize the country’s payments infrastructure, the UK is weighing how to build a system that is resilient, inclusive, and its own. One of the more vocal advocates for that path is John Howells, CEO of LINK, the network behind the UK’s shared ATM system. He argues the UK can work with the world’s largest payment networks without being beholden to them, and cites Canada and Interac as proof that a domestic network can thrive alongside those global players. It’s a perspective Interac has been asked to share with senior UK policymakers and industry leaders, including inside the House of Commons.
Howells and Debbie Gamble, Group Head, Strategy and Marketing at Interac, sat down to discuss the forces reshaping payments, what a sovereign system actually requires, and why the choices both countries make now will echo for decades.
Q: When you talk about payments, there’s a clear theme of timing in both Canada and the UK. Why is acting now so critical?
John Howells: Payments is one of the few things where, if it stops working, the economy stops. So getting this right is fundamental to the country’s competitiveness. We need infrastructure that matches how people and businesses actually behave today. That means lower-cost, reliable ways to move money, and a foundation for the innovation that follows. The goal isn’t to solve for today and freeze it in place; we need to build a system that can absorb whatever comes next, whether that’s new forms of money or AI or anything else. I’d argue we’re fortunate to be doing it now rather than seven years ago. So much has happened in payments in the last three years that if we’d started then, we’d have built the wrong answer and had to start over. Doing it now means building something nimble that bends with change instead of breaking.
Debbie Gamble: That resonates in Canada, and I’d frame the stakes the same way—this isn’t an abstract policy question. Digital sovereignty shows up in practically everything we do. It shows up in who controls our identity systems, who governs our data flows, and who owns the rails our financial systems run on. For me, the concentration of that power in entities that sit outside Canada forces a genuine turning point. If we don’t take sovereignty seriously, we risk losing more than technical capabilities. We risk losing control of some of the core things that are precious to us. The lesson I keep coming back to is that you can’t wait for perfect conditions. It means putting shovels in the ground and building on your own terms, before the moment passes.
Q: If this is a moment to rethink payments from the ground up, what are the forces reshaping how countries design and build their systems today?
John: I’d call out three, starting with money itself. The way money works has barely changed since the Second World War. But now we have stablecoins, tokenized deposits, programmable money—genuinely new forms that bring greater speed and functionality, both within a country and across borders. The second is geopolitics and resilience. We’re seeing state actors trying to bring down payment systems, and trade fragmentation that makes the control you have over your own supply chain a real question. The third is fraud. In the UK we lose over a billion pounds a year to digital fraud, and that money pumps straight into organized crime.
Debbie: What strikes me most is the pace of innovation. I’ve been in this industry a long time—magstripe to chip, chip to contactless, contactless to mobile, the birth of digital currencies. And I can tell you this wave is far beyond any of it. Agentic commerce, programmable money, digital assets—these go far beyond new products sitting on top of the old infrastructure. They’re redefining what the infrastructure even is. With advances in generative AI, that pace won’t slow down anytime soon. That’s what makes this moment unique. I think of it less as upgrading the existing system, and more about deciding what the next one looks like.
Q: When other countries look at how to build a sovereign payments system, they often look to Canada. What does building one actually require?
John: It’s not about trying to replicate the big global networks. Yes, you need solutions that are global and interoperable, but more importantly, you need a strong, sovereign system at the heart of it, so you’re not beholden to only those players. When I look at Interac, that’s exactly what I see: a homegrown organization operating from cash all the way through to digital, at the leading edge, with a proven track record of coexisting with major players in a constructive, competitive ecosystem. I’d like some of that in the UK. People tend to show me Brazil or India or China as case studies. We can learn from them, but they’re different, both culturally and in terms of governance. And so I’m far more interested in how a country like Canada did it, because we share the same hard reality, with hundreds of competitors, regulators, consumer groups and parliamentarians you have to bring along.
Debbie: What I’d want others to take from our story is less about products and technology, and more about the model underneath it. Interac works because it’s a genuinely sovereign solution, owned in Canada and built through deep collaboration between the private and public sectors. That combination—banks, credit unions, government, and regulators all with a stake—is our secret sauce. It’s harder and more intensive than a top-down mandate, but it’s what earns trust, layer by layer, and makes the system durable. Governance is the unglamorous heart of it. For the UK and other countries, the greatest challenge won’t be the technology. It will be doing in three or four years what took us 40—building the trust, and the governance, that lets all those stakeholders move together to drive our economy forward.
Q: Trust underpins all of this. How should countries think about trust as they modernize their payment systems?
John: Trust is table-stakes. If your currency and your infrastructure aren’t stable, reliable and trusted, you don’t get to do anything else. When you walk up to a cash machine, put your card in, and it works every time, that’s the whole thing. And it has to be resilient, too. The example I come back to is Ukraine—under war conditions, their point-of-sale terminals and ATMs keep running. At the same time, it has to include everyone. You can’t have a payment system that 95% of people can use but 5% can’t. In the UK, we think about it a bit like the National Health Service—something that just works, that’s there for everyone whether you’re rich or poor. You can see the personality of a country come through in its payment system.
Debbie: I love that, and I’d even push it one step further. For a long time, trust in payments sat at the brand level. You trusted a name, a logo. What’s changed is that trust now lives in the infrastructure itself. When you pay, you’re trusting that the whole system underneath it works. And once trust moves down into the infrastructure, it matters enormously who built it, because whoever builds it embeds their values in it. They make the decisions about privacy, fairness, inclusion, and how your data is used. Those choices get baked into the rails, and most people never see them. If we care about those values, we can’t outsource the building to organizations outside of Canada. Canadian organizations must be the ones holding the pen.
Q: Looking ahead, what do you want the everyday experience of paying to look like 10, 20, or even 40 years from now?
John: Trusted, working, just part of everybody’s daily life. Not something people talk about, not some whizzy great thing. Reliable, safe, open to everyone. If we’ve done our job, you won’t notice it at all.
Debbie: That invisibility is the highest compliment infrastructure can earn. For Canada, I see it as the foundation. The next layer—the agentic, programmable, AI-driven future we’ve been describing—has yet to be built. And the only question that matters is whether Canadians build it ourselves, on our terms, with our values inside it. Because in payments and technology, defaults often become destiny. The choices that will define the next 40 years are being made right now, and conversations like this one are part of how middle powers like Canada and the UK make sure we’re the ones making them.
