By Pamela Draper, President, Digital Commerce Payments

The United States has had a head start on real-time payments for years, but Canada’s slower approach may mean moving faster in the end.

The Clearing House launched its Real-Time Payments (RTP) network in 2017, followed by the Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service in 2023. Both allow participating financial institutions to move money within seconds, around the clock and year-round.

Canada has followed a slower path. Its Real-Time Rail (RTR), a national infrastructure system designed to support instant, data-rich payments, just launched in November 2026. Payments Canada is bringing participants onto the system in waves, moving Interac e-Transfer clearing and settlement onto the rail during 2027 and anticipates nine in 10 Canadians having access to the RTR by the end of 2027.

Its later launch has given Canadian policymakers and payment service providers (PSPs) time to study what worked in other markets and where earlier adopters have run into trouble. Those lessons shaped Canada’s regulatory framework, the design of the rail itself and the rules its participants will operate under.

Fintech analyst Alex Johnson made a related observation about Canada’s approach to open banking after a recent visit to Toronto, writing, “…you can’t just pick up one country’s playbook for open banking and drop it onto another.”

Johnson also describes a trade-off that helps explain Canada’s pace. Policymakers building a new system want it to work as designed, to arrive quickly and to have the industry’s buy-in. He argues they can usually have only two of the three. Canada tends to give up speed, and RTR, which launches after several delays, fits that pattern. From my seat on Payments Canada’s RTR participant communications subcommittee, I’ve watched that extra time go into testing, participant readiness and shared fraud tools.

Market size, regulation and the composition of the financial services industry influence how new infrastructure should develop. Canada’s deliberate approach offers useful lessons as American financial institutions expand instant payments beyond early adopters.

Build the regulatory foundation before expanding access

Canada rewrote its payments rules before opening the rail to new participants. The Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA), which came fully into force in September 2025, established federal supervision of PSPs, including nonbank companies that facilitate electronic payments. It requires covered providers to register with the Bank of Canada and meet requirements for operational risk management and safeguarding customer funds.

Amendments to the Canadian Payments Act also expanded eligibility for membership in Payments Canada, the organization responsible for Canada’s national payment systems. Previously, fintechs generally relied on banks to access this infrastructure. Registered PSPs can now apply for membership, and the first fintech members joined in January 2026.

In the U.S., many nonbank payment providers face federal requirements administered by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and applicable state oversight. Yet direct participation in FedNow and RTP is generally limited to eligible depository institutions like banks and credit unions. Neobanks, fintechs and PSPs typically access these networks through participating financial institutions. 

Canada’s expanded membership model broadens participation without loosening oversight. For U.S. policymakers, it offers a live test case as the fintech sector grows: Could broader access to national payments infrastructure encourage competition while keeping consumer protections intact? 

Give participants options for accessing the infrastructure

Expanded access gives Canadian fintechs and PSPs more ways to participate in RTR. The right model depends on which responsibilities an organization wants to own and where it wants to invest its resources.

For some organizations, taking on a high degree of direct participation and infrastructure responsibility makes sense. Direct participation can provide greater control over economics, service levels and the product roadmap, but it also means accepting the associated technical, regulatory, operational and financial obligations. Those commitments extend beyond launch to ISO 20022 integration (an international standard for structured financial messaging), compliance, settlement liquidity and 24/7 monitoring.

Other organizations may become Payments Canada members while relying on specialized providers for aspects of connectivity or settlement. For many mid-sized PSPs, this can provide a middle ground between greater independence and the cost of building each capability internally. 

A third approach is continuing to work through an established regulated banking or payments partner. That can be a rational strategy if direct infrastructure ownership does not improve the company’s economics or serve its customer value proposition.

Working with a provider can reduce the infrastructure burden, but it does not eliminate responsibility. A partner’s outage can become your outage. Resilience and accountability should weigh heavily in any provider decision. There is no universal transaction-volume threshold at which greater infrastructure ownership becomes the right strategy. Organizations must weigh the economics of direct participation against the value of investing in their products and customers.

Mitigate fraud by learning (quickly) from others

Traditional batch-based payment systems in both countries have generally given financial institutions more time to investigate suspicious activity before settlement. Instant, irrevocable payments close that window, so banks and PSPs have to spot potential fraud before funds move.

Canada has watched fraud follow instant payments into other markets. In the U.K., authorized push payment scams, in which criminals trick people into sending the money themselves, grew alongside Faster Payments and eventually led to mandatory reimbursement for victims in 2024. RTR will launch with centralized fraud services, including Confirmation of Payee, which checks whether the recipient’s name matches the account information provided. 

Payments Canada is also building a real-time fraud score for each transaction, a shared risk list that flags accounts tied to confirmed fraud and a reporting platform that tracks fraud trends across the network. These shared tools help participants catchsuspicious activity before authorizing a payment while individual institutions remain responsible for fraud decisions and managing their exposure.

Lean into the new product possibilities

Speed is only part of what RTR offers. Interac e-Transfer already provides Canadians with a widely used way to send money quickly, but its transaction limits can restrict higher-value use cases. The new rail can carry instant, higher-value payments for real estate closings, vehicle purchases and contractors finishing a home renovation.

ISO 20022 also allows richer information to travel with payments. Businesses could use that information to improve invoice matching, reconciliation and cash-flow visibility.Canada is also building a consumer-driven banking framework, with payment initiation targeted for mid-2027.

Together, these developments could support more sophisticated account-to-account payment services, including pay-by-bank checkout, instant payouts and better integration between payments and financial management tools.

Share best practices and use cases to make payments more accessible 

The U.S. already has the infrastructure to move money instantly. As adoption grows, banks, fintechs and PSPs should identify where payment delays create measurable costs for their customers and assess whether existing infrastructure and partnerships can support those use cases.

Canada’s RTR rollout also creates an opportunity for U.S. policymakers and industry leaders to examine how expanded participation and shared fraud capabilities work in practice. Those lessons can inform future decisions about payment access, provider oversight and risk management.

Canada’s approach gets its real test over the next year, as RTR moves from a first wave of participants to full capacity. U.S. banks, fintechs and regulators can’t lift Canada’s model wholesale, any more than Canada could have copied the U.S. They can watch which Canadian choices hold up under live volume and borrow the ones that fit.