A senior Wealthsimple executive told a fintech conference in Montreal on Monday that Canada should have had a real-time payment system five years ago, and said the institutions that profit from slow settlement have little reason to deliver one.
Jessica Oliver, Wealthsimple’s head of government and regulatory affairs, made the remarks on an opening panel of the Canada FinTech Forum, the Canadian technology publication BetaKit reported. “This is a file that has not moved, even though for the past five years every single major party in the House of Commons has supported real-time settlement,” Oliver said, according to BetaKit. “That tells you the powerful forces that perpetuate inertia.”
The system at issue is the Real-Time Rail, the infrastructure Payments Canada has been building to let money move between bank accounts within seconds, at any hour of any day, with payment data travelling alongside the funds. Canadians currently rely on Interac e-Transfer and on batch systems that settle on a delay, and businesses routinely wait days for money to clear.
Oliver said the status quo for payment settlement, and the delays that come with it, is “extremely profitable,” BetaKit reported. Financial institutions whose business models depend on payment and settlement fees have little incentive to advance the file, she argued, unlike fintech firms that would be able to offer faster payments. Oliver said government mandates are the strongest lever available to force participation. “If you let people delay settlement, they will,” she said.
Payments Canada originally committed to delivering the system in 2019. BetaKit reported the launch was pushed back to 2022, then rescheduled for mid-2023. Payments Canada now says on its website that the Real-Time Rail is launching in the fourth quarter of 2026.
The organization’s own published material shows how compressed that schedule has become. Payments Canada’s most recent quarterly update on the project, covering the third quarter of 2026, describes reaching “another critical milestone” that it identifies as the start of industry solution assurance testing with participants. The same update says the Real-Time Rail by-law and rules “will be published this quarter” and that the organization continues to onboard new members. A separate Payments Canada notice says the by-law and the rules have received all necessary approvals. That places the final round of participant testing and the publication of the system’s core legal framework in the quarter immediately before the system is meant to go live.
It is also not clear when Canada’s banks will connect. BetaKit reported that a first wave of participating companies is supposed to begin using the system in the fourth quarter, but that the timing of bank connections remains unknown.
Demand appears to be there. Payments Canada research cited on its own website found that three in five Canadian businesses surveyed said they would use real-time payments in their operations.
Political support has not been the obstacle Oliver describes either. Payments Canada publicly welcomed the federal government’s 2026 Spring Economic Update, saying it reaffirmed Ottawa’s commitment to the Real-Time Rail and recognized the system as an engine for national productivity. That record is consistent with Oliver’s central complaint, which is that broad and sustained political agreement has not produced a working system.
Wealthsimple has a direct commercial stake in the outcome. BetaKit noted that the company is one of many Canadian fintechs that have lobbied to advance the file, and disclosed that Wealthsimple’s vice-president of payments strategy and chief compliance officer, Hanna Zaidi, sits on BetaKit’s board of directors.
The tone of the panel was set before Oliver spoke. Visa Canada’s Chris Ferron asked the audience how many of them thought Canada matched its global peers on payments modernization, BetaKit reported. Few hands went up.
The exchange came the same day Prime Minister Mark Carney opened Canada’s first investment summit in Toronto, an event built around persuading global investors that the country is a place capital can move quickly.
