Open Banking & Payments
Canada is years behind its peers on open banking and modern payment rails. Build the financial infrastructure a five-bank oligopoly never had a reason to.
Canadians bank inside one of the most concentrated systems in the developed world, and it shows: open banking has been 'coming' for years, real-time payment rails trail the UK and Australia, and switching costs keep the incumbents comfortable. That inertia is the opportunity. The frontier is the infrastructure and consumer fintech a competitive market would already have — consumer-permissioned data access, modern payment and settlement rails, and the products that finally give Canadians the accounts, credit, and money movement the big banks never prioritized. Wealthsimple and Neo proved the appetite; the rails underneath are still being laid.
