Interac calls for a time-limited, government-led exercise, convened by the Department of Finance, to align the major payments reforms already underway.
Canada is making its most consequential payments-policy decisions in a generation — before settling on what it wants the payments ecosystem to deliver, or which capabilities should remain domestically owned and operated for the decade ahead. In a new white paper, Catalyzing Canada: Payments Sovereignty and the Case for Federal Leadership, Interac argues that the Government of Canada should launch a time-limited national payments vision exercise that aligns, sequences and guides the major reforms already in motion.
The case rests on three propositions.
First, payments policy is linked to what the government wants to achieve across five national priorities: sovereignty and resilience of critical infrastructure, affordability for households and small businesses, competition in financial services, productivity and innovation, and the security of Canadians against fraud. Few policy levers touch all five at once — payments policy does, giving Canada an opportunity to lead with a clear framework for balancing them across the system.
Second, the world is changing quickly enough that delay is now costly: real-time payments infrastructure, consumer-driven banking, regulated digital assets and artificial intelligence are arriving at the same time, and Canadians will not experience them as separate issues.
Third, the federal government has successfully done this before. The 2010–12 Task Force for the Payments System Review built the consensus that underpinned a decade of governance and modernization reform. That review succeeded on its own terms; the pace and convergence of change now require a new vision. Now is the time to set a new vision, fit for 2026 and beyond.
Sovereignty is the thread that ties competition, affordability, innovation and security together, and it is the lens the paper brings to each. Building on our April submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, the paper sets out five questions a national payments vision must address:
- Sovereign infrastructure and digital resilience
- Competition and access
- Affordability and consumer protection
- Innovation, productivity and prosperity
- Security, trust and fraud protection
It deliberately does not prescribe definitive answers; those should emerge through engagement among government, industry, consumers and other stakeholders. The paper argues that Canada should first establish a common destination toward which those discussions are directed. Interac is prepared to contribute its experience in payments, verification, authentication and fraud prevention alongside other participants across the ecosystem. Setting a clear direction now, while sovereignty, competition and trust can still be designed into the system together, is the difference between a system Canada guides and one it inherits.
