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.

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.

Canada's banking sector just received a wake-up call, and it came from the regulator.

OSFI just told Canada's biggest banks they have $1 trillion in unused lending capacity. That's enough to fund every SME dream, startup pitch, and business expansion plan in the country several times over. So why does your local entrepreneur still hear "no" more often than "yes"?