North America · GDP rank #10
Canada
CA · CAD @ 0.7250/USD
Canada runs one of the higher-cost G7 card-payment stacks alongside a near-monopoly domestic debit scheme. Interac Debit handles essentially all card-present debit and Interac e-Transfer cleared roughly 1.6 billion transactions in 2025 — the country's de facto real-time retail rail. Payments Canada's Real-Time Rail (RTR) ended Q1 2026 in performance, security and resilience testing, with first participant access slipping to Q4 2026. Consumer-driven banking implementation is now sequenced under the Bank of Canada following the 2025 Budget reassignment from FCAC.
Tab 05
Cross-border
Inbound and outbound remittance corridors, tourism flows, FX markup on retail cross-border, and the country's posture on stablecoin adoption. Corridor figures come from the World Bank RPW feed or the publishing central bank; both are cited when they disagree.
Remittance inflows
USD · 2023
Remittance outflows
USD · 2023
Inbound tourism spend
CAD · 2024
Outbound tourism spend
CAD · 2024
Avg. corridor cost
% · Q4 2024
Above G7 average; bank-dominated formal channel pricing keeps costs high.
Net sender
Top inbound corridors
- United StatesUS$720M
via bank
Top outbound corridors
- IndiaUS$2.6B
via MTO
- PhilippinesUS$1.3B
via MTO
- ChinaUS$820M
via bank
Cross-border card
Card flow leaving and arriving
Cards issued domestically and used abroad reflect outbound consumer travel and cross-border e-commerce; volume acquired from abroad reflects inbound tourism and foreign online shoppers.
Issued volume spent abroad
CAD/year · 2024
Acquired volume from abroad
CAD/year · 2024
FX cost
What consumers pay above the interbank
Retail FX markup is the spread between the mid-market rate and the rate the consumer receives — the single largest friction point in small-ticket cross-border.
- FX regime
- free-float
- Reference
- CAD free-float since 1970
Source · Bank of Canada
Full reference
Remittances
Net Position: sender
Source: