Explore Accelerating Canada’s Digital Future, the 2023 Interac Corporate Year in Review
In 2023, Interac continued to work collaboratively with governments of all levels across Canada, building up our relationships, advancing go-to-market priorities through sales enablement and delivering public affairs and thought leadership through to government and external stakeholders across a variety of channels.
We worked to broaden our government relationships and role as a trusted advisor, including building and strengthening connections with elected officials, political staff, civil service and regulators. Interac executives and senior leadership made multiple trips to Ottawa and conducted outreach and engagement with stakeholders in a number of provinces including Ontario, Quebec, B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan. We were pleased to host Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Melissa Lantsman, at Interac HQ and Industry Ministry Francois Phillipe Champagne and Immigration Minister Sean Fraser at the Interac booth at Collision.
Interac Verified is already in use by participating government and public sector organizations across the country. In 2023, we worked to increase adoption of trusted verification and authentication solutions across multiple levels of government, supporting our business and client-facing teams as they engaged with provincial and federal officials to build awareness of the product.
In service of our desire to advance the public dialogue on government digital transformation, we sponsored a report titled, “Byte Sized Progress – Assessing Digital Transformation in the Government of Canada”, with Toronto Metropolitan University’s think tank ‘The Dais’. Interac championed a conversation about accessibility to online services, driven by this report, at conferences like Elevate and Excite. Also in 2023, we closed out a successful second year as a partner in the McGill Master’s of Public Policy’s Policy Lab, with a student presentation on data privacy. In 2024, we look forward to again supporting this program in producing the next generation of policy leaders, this time with a policy challenge focused on government digital transformation.
In 2023, Interac welcomed important public policy decisions and developments in payments and financial services made by the Canadian federal government. We were pleased to see the policy related to open banking, now known as consumer driven banking, advance in the 2023 Fall Economic Statement. Interac looks forward to continued participation in the national dialogue supporting this important policy development process. To that end, we were pleased to participate in Finance Canada’s industry working group consultations on open banking, created with the aim to develop a “made-in-Canada” regime by bringing together balanced representation and perspectives from across the ecosystem to advance open banking, in a way that maximizes the benefits for all stakeholders — including consumers.
Interac is enthusiastic about the future of payments, including expanding the availability of real-time account-to-account services and broadening access to new types of organizations. In September 2023 Interac announced broadened access to additional types of financial institutions for participation in the Interac e-Transfer service. Wealthsimple, a leading Canadian provider of digital financial services, received provisional approval to join the Interac e-Transfer service as a participant. We were pleased to see the Government of Canada move forward with updates to the Canadian Payments Act to support broader access to national payment infrastructure for Canadian fintechs. These changes will support Canada’s overall competitiveness amidst a rapidly shifting global and domestic payments landscape.
