Jude Pinto, Chief Delivery Officer at Payments Canada, provides a quarterly update on the Real-Time Rail (RTR), sharing the program’s progress to date and future direction over the coming 3 months.
Since their update in Q4 2024, Payments Canada and their delivery partners, CGI, IBM and Interac, claim to have made progress on the Real-Time Rail (RTR) and are reportedly “more than halfway through the technical build of the RTR.”
The technical build encompasses the installation of hardware in data centers, including servers, storage systems and networking equipment, and the development of software, which includes “coding for the real-time clearing and settlement system.”
Over Q1 2025, Payments Canada will “continue the technical build and prepare for the next phase of work, testing.”
Preparing for testing includes finalizing their test strategy, “selecting test tools, determining approaches and identifying test participants.”
They will be increasing direct member engagement to “prepare member participants for their participation in industry testing.”
This past quarter they claim to have gained momentum in “developing an integrated fraud solution.”
They have reached consensus with members and participants on a fraud strategy and on “high-level requirements for an effective fraud mitigation system.”
With alignment on these elements, they have commenced the foundational centralized fraud solution build for the RTR.
Payments Canada are working with member participants, sharing technical and operational requirements and supporting them in “designing their risk management processes to integrate with these new capabilities.”
Payments Canada and their delivery partners continue to gain insights from other jurisdictions in how their real-time payment systems were launched, and they are “taking those learnings into consideration for a ‘made for Canada’ approach to the RTR with a centralized fraud service.”
They are committed to taking a “proactive approach to fraud mitigation and to delivering a safe and secure real-time payment system to Canada.”
In November 2024, the Bank of Canada completed the registration of payment service providers (PSPs) under the Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA), a step towards implementing amendments to the Canadian Payments Act (CP Act).
The updates to the CP Act, which received royal assent in June, will expand Payments Canada membership “eligibility to PSPs, credit union locals and certain categories of clearing houses involved in clearing and settlement.”
Once the CP Act updates take effect, these entities will be “eligible to apply for Payments Canada membership.”
Upon meeting all requirements and becoming a member, they will then be eligible to “apply for participation in our systems.”
Each system — their retail batch payment system, the Automated Clearing Settlement System (ACSS); their high-value system, Lynx; and the RTR — has its own participation requirements “that members need to meet to become participants.”
Payments Canada is a supporter of this expanded eligibility, which enhances financial inclusivity by allowing a “range of users to benefit from real-time payment processing while complying with regulatory requirements.”
Payments Canada, along with their delivery partners, is dedicated to making the upcoming stages of RTR delivery “as efficient and transparent as possible.”
The RTR is a leap forward in Canada‘s payment infrastructure, aiming to enhance how Canadians transact and manage finances.
As the program progresses, the efforts of Payments Canada, their delivery partners and the ecosystem continue to drive progress toward an efficient and secure payment system for Canadians.