As competition from fintechs heats up, Canada’s largest banks are placing their bets on how tech will change the industry. That’s one takeaway from their latest quarterly earnings reports, which offered a window into how some are adapting in response to new threats—with different approaches across banks.

Take National Bank, for example. The smallest of Canada’s Big Six banks seems to have decided to embrace competing offerings. The company agreed to spend $103 million to take a majority stake in Montreal’s Flinks, a data provider whose software allows third-party apps to make use of bank-account data. The software would be key in a future where open banking is the norm. A bet on open banking isn’t the only way National Bank is emulating fintechs: it’s also eliminating stock-trading fees on its brokerage platform, amid rising competition from no-fee brokers like Wealthsimple. 

TD is taking a different route. Asked on the company’s earnings call Thursday how TD views the threat from discount brokers, Teri Currie, the bank’s group head for Canadian personal banking, said there’s no need to change its model. “I think that we have an offering and a platform that is very unique and adds significant value, and so our starting point wouldn’t be that we need to make a change,” Currie said. On the rising buy-now, pay-later trend in fintech, popularized by companies like Klarna and Affirm, Currie said TD is paying attention—it recently launched its own installment-payment product—but that the trend wasn’t a threat to its business in the near term.

Like TD, RBC also rolled out a BNPL product earlier this year. On its earnings call Wednesday, CEO Dave McKay highlighted that product, called PayPlan, as well as a separate app called Ampli that gives customers additional cash back on purchases, as two ways in which Canada’s largest bank was trying to cater more to retail customers.

The pace of new fintech offerings at Canadian banks is ramping up. But why now? Alex Johnson, fintech research director at Arizona-based banking-consulting firm Cornerstone Advisors, said banks are taking the threat of fintech competition more seriously. “It’s only been in the last five years, and really the last two years, that fintech companies have reached a level of maturity and scale where they really now are seen as a competitive threat for banks,” Johnson told The Logic. 

“That has motivated a real shift in banks’ strategies for internal product development and what they build, as well as encouraging them to be much more active in building partnerships with fintech companies, and driving a lot more acquisitions.”