Arnaud Richards, Chief Revenue Officer at Vyntra, explains why Canadian banks must act now to strengthen their operational readiness as the country moves toward a real-time financial ecosystem and why the hidden tension between speed and trust will define the winners.
Canada’s payments ecosystem is at a pivotal stage of transformation. The journey toward simplification and modernisation is accelerating, with efforts such as the introduction of the Real-Time Rail (RTR) and increased regulatory oversight reshaping the landscape. This shift will profoundly impact the nation’s financial services industry anchored by five dominant banks that control over 90% of total banking assets and market share.
Despite their historical strength and resilience, particularly during periods of global financial stress, Canadian banks now face a new class of technical and operational challenges. Legacy infrastructure and fragmented data environments are increasingly at odds with the growing demand for faster, more transparent, and more secure payment experiences. At the same time, traditional financial institutions must navigate these pressures while contending with broader economic headwinds and rising competition from PSPs and global fintechs.
This was the context in which Vyntra joined the conversation at the 2026 Payments Canada Summit in Toronto last week. On Wednesday 6 May, I had the opportunity to sit on the panel Strengthening competitiveness through operational resilience alongside leaders from TD Bank Group and Scotiabank. The discussion reinforced something we see in every market preparing for real-time payments: the hidden tension between instant experiences and the invisible infrastructure that makes them safe and the role transaction observability now plays in resolving it. The session was brilliantly moderated by Donald Charette, Lead Information Security and Technology Risk at Payments Canada, whose sharp questioning kept the conversation focused on what operational resilience really means in a real-time environment. His framing of resilience as an accelerator for customer experience, rather than a compliance constraint, set the tone for one of the most engaging discussions of the Summit.
A moment of change
Under new mandates such as the Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA), the Bank of Canada has begun registering payment service providers (PSPs), aka bringing these players under formal oversight for the first time, enabling them to build trust, scale with more confidence, and gain direct access to core payment systems. This levelling of the regulatory playing field is expected to increase market participation and foster healthy competition alongside traditional banks.
As the high-value and real-time payment rails continue to evolve under regulatory oversight, institutions are under pressure to modernise both operationally and technologically. They’re actively exploring new infrastructure, data capabilities, and monitoring tools to support this shift. This is a crucial moment for Canadian banks to strengthen their operational readiness, not just to meet evolving expectations, but to lead in a real-time economy. The momentum is here, both in regulation and innovation. Now, it’s about execution.
The hidden tension: what consumers actually expect
Vyntra’s recent research, surveying over 1,000 adults on what they value in the payment experience, surfaced a tension Canadian institutions cannot afford to ignore.
Consumers want speed but they will not trade trust for it.
- More than 50% of respondents said only an hour or less of total downtime per year is acceptable from their payment provider.
- 20% said no downtime is acceptable at all.
- 80% said they would be likely to switch providers after repeated outages.
- And critically, over half welcome additional verification steps when those steps clearly enhance security.
That last finding overturns a long-standing industry assumption. Frictionless is no longer the universal goal. Purposeful (visible, explained, and proportionate to risk) friction is increasingly read by consumers as a sign of competence, not a failure of UX. In a real-time environment, this insight changes the design brief for every Canadian institution.
Pillars of payments modernization: Building resilience across the stack
As Canada moves toward a real-time financial ecosystem, resilience has become a strategic priority, not a compliance checkbox. Institutions today must approach resilience as a multi-layered strategy across business, operational, and technical domains. These layers are interconnected: technology provides the foundation, operations drive execution, and business resilience is the ultimate goal.
Business resilience: Ensuring continuity of critical operations
At the top of the stack, business resilience is about safeguarding critical services and customer commitments, particularly during times of stress. According to the Bank of Canada’s Operational Resilience and Operational Risk Management Guideline, Canadian institutions are now expected to identify their most essential business functions, define impact tolerances, and establish plans to maintain service delivery. Payments Canada has reinforced this focus through high-availability investments, including the launch of a secondary data centre for Lynx, the country’s high-value payment system.
Technical resilience: The infrastructure beneath it all
Technical resilience underpins everything else. Canadian banks are under pressure to modernise decades-old infrastructure to meet the expectations of a 24/7 economy. Systems must perform at scale, but they must also be tested, secure, and adaptable. With the Real-Time Rail on the horizon, the need for infrastructure that is robust, flexible, and deeply observable will only grow.
By treating resilience as a layered, interconnected capability rather than a siloed requirement, Canada’s financial institutions can better navigate the demands of modernisation, regulation, and customer trust.
From reactive to proactive: Know Your Transaction
In a real-time payments environment, being reactive is no longer enough. As transaction volumes grow and customer expectations for instant service rise, banks must anticipate issues before they escalate.
The financial industry has long built its trust foundations on Know Your Customer and Know Your Business. The next layer, the one a real-time economy demands, is Know Your Transaction (KYT): the ability for an institution to know, at any given moment, where every transaction is in its lifecycle and what risk it carries. The concept is borrowed from compliance frameworks already used in digital-asset markets, but it applies just as naturally to traditional payments under RTR. In a world where settlement happens in seconds, knowing the customer is no longer sufficient. Institutions need to know the transaction.
KYT requires end-to-end observability: the ability to see every transaction across systems, formats, and channels in real time; alongside the traceability and speed needed to manage exceptions, compliance, and customer service.
Canada’s move toward real-time infrastructure also reshapes the fraud picture. Once funds are transferred over RTR, recovery is significantly harder, which compresses the detection window into milliseconds. Data from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre shows fraud losses continuing to rise — much of it linked to scams and authorised push payment-style attacks. But fraud controls cannot operate in isolation: they depend on the same real-time visibility into transaction flows that observability provides. Predictive controls, ISO 20022’s richer data formats, and machine learning all rely on the institution being able to see, in the moment, what is actually happening across its payment estate. KYT is the connective tissue.
For some context on the operational side: investigating a single lost payment can cost a bank as much as $250–$300, and as transaction volumes increase, those costs spiral without the right monitoring tools. Transaction management platforms address this by enabling institutions to access and monitor payment flows across systems in real time, regardless of format or platform. Two core capabilities matter most:
- Real-time accessibility of transaction data to support instant decision-making.
- Track and Trace functionality for end-to-end visibility, proactive alerts on delayed or failed payments, and a clear view of what’s at stake before a customer even needs to call.
In practice, this approach can prevent up to 500,000 payment-related calls per bank annually — a measurable impact on cost, service quality, and customer experience. On the compliance front, the same tooling supports regulatory reporting needs.
In a world where milliseconds matter, layered capabilities like dynamic anomaly detection and early fraud alerting are no longer optional, they are essential.
The road ahead: Moving from awareness to action
The hidden tension in every payment lies in the gap between the smooth experience consumers see and the complex operations providers manage behind the scenes. Consumers will accept, and even welcome, purposeful friction when it strengthens trust. What they will not tolerate is repeated disruption, unexplained failures, or a lack of transparency.
For Canadian financial institutions, the implication is clear: resilience, transparency, and intentionally-designed security are now as important as speed and convenience. As Canada modernises its payments infrastructure, the opportunity is to shift from reaction to readiness and from knowing the customer to knowing the transaction. The institutions that invest now in real-time visibility, seeing every transaction end to end, will not only meet regulatory expectations. They will lead in customer trust, competitive performance, and help shape a stronger, more agile financial ecosystem for Canada’s real-time future.
The competitive edge will go to those who can reconcile the competing demands: building “invisible” infrastructure that rarely falters, being candid with customers when issues arise, and integrating security seamlessly into the user journey. Those institutions will turn the hidden tension in every payment from a trade-off into a trust-building advantage.
Arnaud Richards
Arnaud Richards is Chief Revenue Officer at Vyntra. He recently joined Andrea Ng (Senior Manager, Enterprise Payments Governance, TD Bank Group) and Nitin Sehtya (Managing Director, Cash Management and Corporate Client Service, Scotiabank) at the 2026 Payments Canada Summit in Toronto, on the panel “Strengthening competitiveness through operational resilience,” moderated by Donald Charette, Lead Information Security and Technology Risk at Payments Canada.”
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