Canada’s real-time payment revolution is already here – why aren’t more enterprises using it?

On 17 June, 2025, Open Banking Expo Canada will convene a panel on modernizing payments by leveraging existing infrastructure.

Paybilt’s chief technology officer Vlad Cazan

Among the speakers is Vlad Cazan, chief techonology officer at Paybilt, whose work in real-time payments has remained largely under the radar, even as it has helped shape how some of Canada’s most prominent enterprises move money today.

Canada is often seen as trailing global peers like India or Brazil when it comes to real-time payments. But the reality is more nuanced. Infrastructure like Interac e-Transfer has been in place and widely adopted for years. The challenge now is not just building new rails, but finding better ways to use the highly capable ones we already have.

This is where Paybilt has played a quiet but significant role to enterprises seeking to optimize payments with the vast array of payment rails already available. Rather than wait for new infrastructure to be built, Paybilt has focused on the application layer: creating tools that allow Canadian businesses to offer real-time disbursements, payroll, and checkout experiences using systems already in place. Many enterprises rely on these capabilities today without their customers ever realising it.

This invisibility is intentional. Paybilt’s view is that the best payment experiences should be elegant, immediate, and ultimately forgettable to the end user. In a marketplace crowded with apps, wallets, and fintech add-ons, the winning model may be one that doesn’t ask consumers to do anything new at all. No change in behaviour. No new account to create. Just a simple, seamless transaction.

While other companies have attempted to modernize Canadian payment flows in years past, few succeeded in making it usable at scale. Today, Paybilt is the only firm with real traction in this space. Its platform is now a discrete yet critical component of the payment stack for numerous large Canadian enterprises – a fact that has earned it a reputation as one of the best-kept secrets in the industry.

With the upcoming launch of Canada’s Real-Time Rail and a phased Open Banking rollout underway, the focus is again turning to infrastructure. However, adoption of new infrastructure will always require application-layer innovation. The payment technologies that prevail in the future will not require consumers or merchants to adapt to new systems. Rather, the systems must adapt to the needs and desires of sellers and buyers.

Canada’s real-time payment potential already exists. The question now is how to make more of it, and who will lead that next phase of adoption. The companies best positioned to answer that are the ones already doing the work.

Catch Vlad Cazan on the Open Finance Stage at 3.35pm in a Panel Discussion, ‘Modernizing Payments – Leveraging existing payment methods for new capabilities’ at Open Banking Expo Canada on June 17, in Toronto. Find out more about the agenda here.