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The Canadian government has been trying for about 4-5 years now to get Canadian banks to embrace Open Banking, which will allow these sorts of products to be built quickly.

The banks have consistently refused to do anything, because they don't want any change that threatens their oligopoly. Canadian bank services are more or less the same as they were a decade ago.

The current government will have to show that it can resist rich people lobbying in this regard, before any real change can happen.

by dmix4 hours ago|

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Indeed, no one seems to ever talk about the banking monopoly in Canada so it's not a big political issue. It's not nearly as controversial as the telecom or airline monopolies.

There are some new banking startups popping up in Canada like Neo Financial (from the guys who made SkipTheDishes) but they are online-only and have limited integration with stuff like Plaid.

by stackedinserter2 hours ago|

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Canadian banks still live in 2006. They can't even make EMT transfers more convenient, so people could request a payment or pay with QR.

Sometimes I feel like they don't actually refuse to do things, maybe they are not capable to improve. Something in their chain of command is broken and doesn't let them change.

by ehhthing8 hours ago|

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This would still rely on Visa/MasterCard allowing dual-branded credit cards for overseas transactions, which isn't a very common arrangement. The only market that has this is in Asia where there are UnionPay + Visa/MasterCard dual branded cards and I suspect that the reason they allow this is because the market is huge, especially compared to Canada.

Also Interac does not do online transactions outside of some very specific merchants that take Apple/Google Pay transactions. This is how Interac reduces fraud risk, which is why interchange rates for Interac are so low.

by ninth_ant29 minutes ago|

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> This would still rely on Visa/MasterCard allowing dual-branded credit cards for overseas transactions, which isn't a very common arrangement

We can and should make this practice illegal, along with several other anticompetitive policies in this space. Oh no they might hit us with tariffs in response?

by kspacewalk27 hours ago|

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You can do this in multiple steps. Start with a credit card usable only with Canadian merchants, which will cover a great majority of transactions of a great majority of Canadians. I'll have an MC for travel and the ordering from non-Canadian merchants, and this Canadian credit card for the other 95% of my expenses. If a significant percentage of Canadians have such a card, major non-Canadian services will add it as a payment option (e.g. ChatGPT or Claude). Then you branch out by either joining or co-branding with the EU credit card company if such a company succeeds.

A world with a patchwork of payments processing options will look different for travel and business, in some ways worse, but such is life in a "multipolar world" which the Americans elected their leadership to conjure up.