Open banking is coming, but don’t get your hopes up for how quickly, Bank of Canada payments head Ron Morrow said at a Toronto conference Thursday.

“I will fully admit I’m somewhat daunted by getting this thing up and running,” he said at the Open Banking Expo, a conference dedicated to the financial data-sharing framework Ottawa has pledged to launch this year. “I think it would be premature and ill-advised to start talking about a date when we don’t have a full understanding of what work needs to be done.”

Delayed again? In the Bank of Canada’s first public remarks on the open banking file, Morrow stopped short of confirming the institution no longer thinks a 2026 launch for open banking is realistic. The to-do list he laid out would make a launch this year extremely difficult to pull off, however. Morrow said the central bank is still in the information-gathering stage, compiling a list of all the things that need to be done before going live. Once that work is complete in “the coming months,” Morrow said he hopes to be able to put a timeline together. He also said the fintechs, banks and others participating in the framework will need “an appropriate amount of lead time” to ensure they’re compliant with all the requirements.

Catch up quickly: Canada’s big banks and fintechs have a history of butting heads over open banking. The framework will require financial institutions to share data through a standardized feed at a customer’s request, making it easier to switch banks and use competing products. Currently, many digital financial services rely on screen scraping, which requires a customer to hand their online banking password over to a bot that impersonates them in order to copy transaction records and other data. Banks, privacy advocates and policymakers have raised alarms about the practice, which Ottawa has pledged to ban once open banking goes live.

New kid on the block: Morrow nodded to the many delays open banking has faced since Ottawa first committed to launching it in the 2018 budget. “I do recognize that you’ve all been waiting years,” he said. In November, the government threw a curveball by putting the Bank of Canada in charge of the framework, which had previously been overseen by the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC). Morrow said the FCAC has been “very, very helpful” in helping the central bank get up to speed.

Great expectations: The November budget raised expectations for how quickly the Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney would move on open banking and other fintech-related files. His administration announced stablecoin and open banking legislation in its first budget, released a preview of it the same day the budget passed and tabled the full version the next day. Open banking advocates also applauded the federal government’s decision to put the Bank of Canada in charge of the file because it puts oversight of tech-enabled payments activities under one roof. In addition to open banking and stablecoins, the central bank is also newly responsible for supervising fintechs that offer payments products.

The Bank of Canada is handling all those new responsibilities with fewer resources. The day after the Liberal government tabled the budget, the central bank confirmed it has agreed to trim its spending by 15 per cent from 2026 to 2028 and cut 10 per cent of its workforce by June.

On Thursday, Morrow said the Bank of Canada is up to the challenge. “There is a lot of work to do to bring this to life. I have every confidence that we’ll be able to do it,” he said.