On July 28, Ramp officially launched in Canada and opened its first international office in downtown Toronto. It is a genuinely large moment. Ramp was last valued at US$44B after its US$750M raise in June, serves more than 70,000 organizations globally and processes over US$200B in annualized purchase volume. Canada is now the second country on that map.
Two data points arrived this week that, individually, are significant. Together, they draw a line through the future of Canadian lending that every executive can read.
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.
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.