AI & Lending

Meta: A 200-year-old bank just told the financial world that banking hours are optional. If you are still running your lending operations as if it were 2015, BMO's announcement should feel less like news and more like a starting pistol.

On March 24, Bank of Montreal announced a partnership with CME Group and Google Cloud to launch a tokenized cash and deposit platform built on Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL). The deal makes BMO the first bank to offer CME's tokenized cash solution, enabling institutional clients to convert U.S. dollars into digital instruments that settle around the clock, independent of traditional banking windows.

Canada just changed who gets to play in its national payments game, and Meridian Credit Union decided not to wait on the sidelines.

This week, a fee that has quietly extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from some of Canada's most financially stretched households got a hard ceiling.

Canada just did something that would have sounded like science fiction five years ago: it issued, traded, and settled a $100 million bond on a blockchain, in real time, using digital central bank money. And the most remarkable part? It worked.

The most important financial technology announcements rarely sound exciting at first. "Payments infrastructure partnership" isn't exactly going to trend on social media. But strip away the press release language and what Peoples Group and Fiserv just announced is one of the more consequential infrastructure moves in Canadian fintech in recent memory.