Dec. 13, 2016
Payments Canada’s announcement of a multi-year, multi-phase plan to modernize Canada’s payment systems is “necessary to keep up with the international developments,” Kashif Zaman, a partner in Osler’s Financial Services Group, tells PaymentsCompliance. In the article, author Jimmy Nicholls outlines the new upgrades to Canada’s payment infrastructure and what kinds of opportunities these upgrades present. Kashif says these changes — which include ways to speed up payments, improve the security of the infrastructure “pipes,” and a real-time payments trail — will have a widespread positive impact on Canadian business.
“(These changes will allow Canada) to reap the full benefits of the technological advances in the mobile payments and peer-to-peer space that have a huge untapped potential to benefit consumers,” Kashif tells PaymentsCompliance.
“The real-time payments capacity will have a far-reaching impact from both consumers as well as a business perspective,” he added.
“This capacity is almost a necessity now for the financial institutions to keep up with the technological advances such as payment transfers through the use of blockchain technology.”
Kashif also says that with these modifications come regulatory compliance issues as well, which he says companies need to be cognizant of.
“The upgrade to the industry standards are expected to require substantial investments from the financial institutions and the compliance requirements will have to be integrated into the new systems and upgrades,” he said.
“There will be some risk of missing compliance with some of the requirements because of growing pains that financial institutions will inevitably face as they upgrade their systems.”
If you subscribe to PaymentsCompliance, you can find out more by reading Jimmy Nicholls’s article “Canada to upgrade payments plumbing in innovation drive.”