For the first time in its history, Payments Canada has admitted non-bank financial technology companies as members. If that sentence doesn’t make you sit up a little straighter, consider this: the organization processes more than $411 billion every single business day, and it just opened its doors to companies that move faster, build leaner, and think differently about how money should work.
The Five Companies That Just Changed the Game
Wise, Float, KOHO, Paramount Commerce, and Brim Financial are now officially Payments Canada members. Each brings something distinct to the table. Wise is a global cross-border payments powerhouse. Float handles corporate spend management for thousands of Canadian businesses. KOHO has built one of the country’s most popular consumer fintech platforms. Paramount Commerce specializes in bank-account-based payment processing. And Brim is evolving from a card and banking platform into what it calls a full-stack payments infrastructure provider.
These aren’t startups playing around in a sandbox. These are scaled, Bank of Canada-registered payment service providers that have earned the right to sit at the same table as the country’s chartered banks. The legislative changes to the Canadian Payments Act that made this possible were years in the making, and they represent a deliberate policy choice to inject competition into an ecosystem that has historically been, let’s say, exclusive.
Why This Matters More Than a Press Release
Until now, fintechs in Canada had to access the payment system through bank intermediaries. Think of it like having a gym membership but needing someone else to swipe you in every time. It worked, technically, but it added cost, complexity, and latency. Direct membership eliminates the middleman for these PSPs. They can now apply to participate in Canada’s core systems (the Automated Clearing Settlement System, Lynx, and the forthcoming Real-Time Rail) without going through a bank partner.
The Real-Time Rail is the headline act here. When it launches (industry testing is underway in 2026), it will enable real-time, 24/7/365 clearing and settlement of retail payments—with funds delivered to recipients within 60 seconds. Canada is one of the last G7 countries to deploy an instant payment system, and the RTR’s design is intentionally modern, API-ready, and built to support new entrants. For these five new members, RTR access could be transformative. For banks already on the system, it means the competitive landscape just got more interesting.
The Bigger Picture: Open Banking, RTR, and the Modernization Trifecta
This membership expansion doesn’t exist in isolation. Canada’s 2025 federal budget committed to launching open banking (read access) by 2026 and payment initiation (write access) by mid-2027. The Retail Payments Activities Act is now in force, with the Bank of Canada supervising PSPs. And Payments Canada itself cleared and settled $103 trillion in 2025. That’s the backdrop. The convergence of PSP membership, the RTR, and open banking could be the most significant transformation in Canadian financial services infrastructure since the introduction of Interac.
What Smart Banks Are Doing Right Now
The savviest institutions aren’t viewing this as a threat. They’re viewing it as a signal. The banks that partner with these new PSP members, offering settlement services, co-developing products, or simply learning from their technology stacks, will position themselves at the center of a more dynamic ecosystem. The ones that hunker down and hope the moat holds are going to find the water rising faster than expected.
For mortgage lenders specifically, the implications warrant close monitoring. Faster payment rails mean faster disbursements. Real-time verification reduces fraud risk. And an open banking framework could eventually enable instant income and asset verification, dramatically speeding up and improving the mortgage approval process. The infrastructure being built today is the foundation for a lending experience tomorrow that looks nothing like the one we have now.
The Takeaway
Canada’s payments ecosystem is opening up. Not in theory, not in a consultation paper, but in practice. Five fintech companies now have the same membership status as the banks that have run this system for over a century. The organizations that treat this as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience will be the ones writing the next chapter of Canadian financial services. The question isn’t whether the payments landscape is changing. It’s whether your institution is changing with it.