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.
When Canada's banking regulator starts publishing a bulletin called "The Ledger" with its own ISSN number, you know things are getting serious. OSFI's first issue, released January 19, 2026, marks the official starting gun for the implementation phase of the Data Collection Modernization initiative. And while "data collection modernization" ranks somewhere between "drainage infrastructure" and "HVAC maintenance" on the excitement scale, the implications for Canadian banking are genuinely transformative.
Somewhere right now, a Canadian with seven-figure digital assets is opening a bank account in Zurich. It's not tax evasion. It's impatience.
Canada just signalled it wants to become the financial nerve centre for Western defence spending. And if you're not paying attention, you're already behind.
The Canadian banking landscape just lost another player. But in a plot development nobody saw coming, the last one standing just got a whole lot stronger.