Payments Canada will grant banks and fintechs access to the Real-Time Rail (RTR) instant payments system in waves, with access available to all participants some time in 2027. 

In an interview, chief payments officer Donna Kinoshita said the non-profit organization in charge of Canada’s payments infrastructure plans to give access to participating institutions in three phases, starting in the fourth quarter of 2026. She said she could not confirm whether the first wave will include all of the country’s Big Six banks. In an email sent after publication, Kinoshita said all companies that are ready to join the RTR on day one will be able to, and that the second and third phases will consist of companies that were not ready by the earlier deadlines.

All banks will be required to receive payments through the RTR once they gain access, Kinoshita said. She said it will be up to them to decide whether to offer customers the ability to send payments through the RTR, or build other products using the system. Banks and fintechs will also choose when to announce they have gone live, she said.

“That’s part of the competitive environment. What use cases are you going to bring to life?” she said. “We leave it to the participants to determine how they want to participate.”

Payments Canada finished building the RTR last summer, after repeated delays and more than a decade after Ottawa first started laying the groundwork for it. The system is now in testing ahead of the launch. Once live, payments will send, clear and settle almost instantly, 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, and can include data that will make it easier to track payments and settle disputes.

But the staged rollout, combined with letting banks and fintechs decide how customers can use it, will mean the benefits won’t be immediately available to everyone. For example, a fintech that builds software to let customers transfer funds instantly from their bank accounts to prepaid credit cards might only be able to offer it to customers of certain banks.

Banks may not rush to offer such capability. As The Logic has previously reported, the RTR has been a flashpoint between fintechs, who stand to benefit from the competition and innovation it could unleash, and large banks, which risk losing market share and profit from transaction fees. Bank executives resisted Payments Canada’s progress on the RTR in the past, although the organization denied that large financial institutions had enough influence to block reforms.

At the Payments Canada Summit in downtown Toronto Tuesday, CEO Susan Hawkins noted that 1,800 payments businesses have registered with the Bank of Canada, the first step to accessing the RTR. She called on the country’s banks and fintechs to build products that take advantage of the RTR’s capabilities: “Use it ambitiously, designed inclusively, so that every region, every community, every family, sees real benefit from this modernization.”

In an email, Adriana Vega, executive director of the industry group Fintechs Canada, said the RTR has the potential to contribute billions to the economy, but only if it’s widely adopted. She said granting access in phases is “understandable for a project of this scale,” but said it will be crucial for fintechs and banks to “participate in lockstep” to avoid creating new barriers to competition.

Robert Fay, a senior fellow at Waterloo’s Centre for International Governance Innovation who studies the digital economy, said in an email that Canada still has a lot to do before it catches up to the more than 100 other countries, including the U.S., India and Brazil, that already have instant payment systems. Economist and financial consultant Andrew Spence said it’s “disappointing” that not everyone will get access to it at once.

“Relief for consumers from payment frictions and excessive charges is long overdue,” he said in an email. “The incomplete delivery sticks out like a sore thumb given the speed at which other countries have been able to deliver.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with information Payments Canada supplied to The Logic after publication.