How real-time payments are reshaping Canada’s treasury landscape
Key takeaways
- Real-time payments are quickly becoming standard in Canada, making competitive advantage less about speed itself and more about how companies use speed to improve visibility, decision-making and control.
- The bigger challenge now is managing cross-border payments, where businesses need greater visibility, predictability, and control to handle ongoing complexity and risk.
- Treasury teams are using real-time data and tools to strengthen liquidity management and turn greater visibility into a business advantage.
Canada’s payments landscape is being recast at high speed, and the once predictable routines of corporate treasurers are being pushed into the digital fast lane. The change is as much cultural as technological for the practitioners who sit at the center of cash management.
“I have been on the ground here in Canada for over 25 years,” says Lyndsay Langford, Bank of America’s head of Global Payments Solutions for Canada. “In the past, we had wires, EFT and checks. Today, clients demand faster payments, less friction and better visibility into their cash flows.”
Those demands have forced treasury teams to evolve manual processes and build real time visibility into positions and forecasts, fundamentally changing how they manage liquidity.
That shift is playing out against a sweeping upgrade of Canada’s underlying rails. Payments Canada began its modernization plan in 2016, replacing the legacy wire system with Lynx and preparing the country’s first real time rail (RTR).
“We’re heavily focused right now as a country on the buildout and the launch of real time payments,” Langford says.
As this modernization progresses, payments are moving toward near-instant settlement and greater flexibility across the ecosystem. While much of the focus has been on modernizing domestic payments, many businesses are now facing a different challenge: how to achieve the same speed, visibility and control across borders.
The challenge is no longer moving money faster—it is managing what speed exposes.
Managing cross-border complexity
Faster payments alone do not erase the uncertainty of moving money across borders. Geopolitical tension and exchange rate movements continue to shape how companies manage global payments, adding complexity even as settlement speeds improve.
Risk mitigation for cross border payments is rising to the top of the priority list. "We want to make sure the options we put in front of clients are secure, cost effective and fast where speed is important,” according to Langford.
At the same time, businesses are increasingly looking for consistency across regions, so treasury teams can operate with the same level of visibility and control globally.
The next phase of payments in Canada
Listening to clients remains central, with ongoing engagement ensuring new capabilities reflect evolving business needs. The next phase of change will expand participation in Canada’s payments ecosystem, increasing competition and giving businesses more flexibility in how they pay and get paid.
With this complexity, the goal is to make things easier as they become more complex. Langford expects that competitive pressure will continue to drive innovation in how payments are managed and delivered and that the real time rail will be the platform for future innovation in Canada.
A shift is already underway
For many Canadian businesses, the focus is moving from how to move money faster within Canada to include how to manage payments more effectively across borders. That shift is likely to define the next phase of payments innovation.
In a real-time world, speed is expected; advantage comes from using speed to see more, act faster and make better decisions.
Lyndsay Langford | Managing Director, Head of Global Payments Solutions-Canada, Bank of America
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