Canada

Interac functions as the de facto national debit and instant-retail utility

Interac Debit is the only card-present debit scheme of scale and is accepted at essentially every Canadian POS; Interac e-Transfer does the work that would elsewhere sit on an instant-payments rail and cleared roughly 1.6 billion transactions in 2025. Dependence on a single private-sector network has been flagged by the Competition Bureau and Bank of Canada oversight, but no structural unbundling is in motion ahead of the RTR's phased launch.

Canadian credit card MDR remains among the higher rates in the G7

Weighted-average credit MDR sits around 1.4% — broadly similar to the US but materially above Australia, the UK and the EU. The August 2023 voluntary interchange reduction by Visa and Mastercard (at Department of Finance request) lowered small-business rates from October 2024 but did not introduce a statutory cap. The 2022 federal removal of the surcharging prohibition allows merchants to pass credit-card surcharges to consumers; debit surcharging remains prohibited under the Code of Conduct.

Consumer-driven banking moves from FCAC to Bank of Canada oversight

Bill C-69 established the federal framework for consumer-driven banking in June 2024. The November 2025 federal budget reassigned supervisory responsibility from FCAC to the Bank of Canada, aligning with the Bank's PSP mandate under the Retail Payment Activities Act. Read-only access remains targeted for 2026; payment initiation slips into 2027. The Canadian regime stays narrower than the UK or Australia but closes a decade-long policy gap.

Payments Canada confirmed in its Q1 2026 quarterly update that the RTR is in performance, security and resilience testing, with phased participant access starting Q4 2026. Request-to-pay slips to a later release. Large billers (utilities, telecoms, insurers) remain a pre-qualified migration set away from pre-authorized debit and card recurring. PSPs building consent, mandate and dispute workflows ahead of access have a 12–18 month head start over acquirer incumbents.

Read-access consumer-driven banking opens year-one for the 1.2M Canadian SMB accounting market dominated by QuickBooks, Xero and Wave. Screen-scraping workarounds — legally tenuous and technically fragile — will be displaced. Finance operations tools (Float, Plooto, Rogo, Jeeves) offering native consent-based data integration earn a structural advantage as Bank of Canada supervision replaces FCAC's transitional role.

Interac's 2024 partnership with Mastercard Cross-Border Services opened outbound remittances from Canadian accounts into 90+ corridors. The inbound story remains weaker; PSPs aggregating Mexican, Filipino and Indian remittance corridors into Canadian bank-account deposit via Interac e-Transfer have a live distribution advantage that incumbents have yet to match.