There's a moment in every poker game when someone pushes all their chips to the center of the table. Last week, RBC and TD did exactly that; except instead of chips, it was billion-dollar AI commitments with their names attached.
At Momentum 2025, one message cut through the noise: survival in lending now depends on reinvention. Not once—but always.
The most dangerous phrase in banking isn't "market crash" or "regulatory investigation"—it's "that's how we've always done it." While Canada's Big Five banks cling to their fortress mentality around crypto, a mid-sized Alberta bank just showed them what happens when you actually listen to your customers instead of your lawyers.
The Bank of Canada finally said what Canadian fintech executives have been thinking for years: our payment infrastructure is embarrassing. But this time, they're proposing stablecoins as the solution.
The math was brutal, and the solution was obvious. Yet it took Canada's financial sector until September 2025 to figure out what every security expert has been shouting from the rooftops: you can't win a war when everyone's fighting their own private battle.