The new mega-deduction recently announced [1] results in an effective 6% corporate tax rate, which is among the lowest in the world and certainly in the G-7. Things like the RTR are just one example among many of the efficient infrastructure that Canada is introducing to address a very long term productivity gap (the mega-deduction is another).

And, R&D conducted in Canada is always a current-year expense and never capitalized. And there is a refundable tax credit for R&D that works out to about 60% of engineers' salaries (in most provinces). And those salaries are lower than they are in the US (something that engineers in Canada have a right to complain about).

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2026/09/gov...

“I said they were the best engineers in Canada.”

(Quote from the BlackBerry movie)

Attracting strong talent in Canada is hard given the massive pay differences gained by moving south of the border.

The size of the pay difference is something you, as the prospective employer, have significant direct control of. It is within your authority to point the dial anywhere from "hard to find anybody because of the massive pay difference" to "easy to attract strong talent, while still saving money relative to what it would cost to attract the same level of talent in the US".

The Canadian business establishment will not come after you to break your knees if you offer higher wages than they do.

(Later a large part of our staff was Canadians returning home in 2016 after doing their time in Mountain View)

I've worked for many companies over the years that chose to colocate here because of the relative ease of finding talent.

And there's plenty of good talent that doesn't leave. Because we don't want to. Home is home.

There's also lots of us who work remote for US or EU companies these days.

(Blackberry movie also is garbage)

It's easy to knock Canada for its personal income tax rate, but compared to European alternatives, it's still quite low, despite offering a whole lot of baseline public goods.

That said, while senior SWE salaries here absolutely not even close to competitive with the Bay Area or NYC they are not that far off from other places in the US (like smaller midwest cities etc). While Canadian salary packages are depressed, it's also partially a result of: they're not inflated.

The bigger concern is more the lack of interesting work.

Many do similar calculations. Home is home. It's profoundly arrogant (and very American) to assume that the "best talent" moves for money and opportunity.

Americans have very high labour mobility rates, and often assume that's how the whole world works. But in most places in the world the idea of uprooting your whole life for a job is seen as odd.

Most recently I tried to use Airwallex (payments provider) for a product that does international payouts and they ONLY let you use their product if you're based in the States.

Canada sometimes has alternatives on offer, but they're usually broken and lacking features.

Which internet infrastructure is an afterthought in Canada?

I don't personally think federal incorporation is a huge benefit relative to provincial/state-level incorporation. It mainly provides name protection in every province/federally and makes it marginally easier to expand nationally in Canada. It's main disadvantage is a requirement for Canadian-resident directors which can make it a bit difficult to sell the corporation. The tax laws are the same (though for the most part, if you operate outside of Quebec, you're only dealing with one tax agency), and you still have to file extra-provincially in each province you carry on business, which itself comes with provincial filing requirements (i.e. not a one stop shop).

>The new mega-deduction recently announced [1] results in an effective 6% corporate tax rate, which is among the lowest in the world and certainly in the G-7. Things like the RTR are just one example among many of the efficient infrastructure that Canada is introducing to address a very long term productivity gap (the mega-deduction is another).

This is only for new business investment, though granted since you're discussing startups, it's valid to mention that.

>And, R&D conducted in Canada is always a current-year expense and never capitalized. And there is a refundable tax credit for R&D that works out to about 60% of engineers' salaries (in most provinces). And those salaries are lower than they are in the US (something that engineers in Canada have a right to complain about).

This is true. I do wonder how much of an comparative advantage this is now that engineer salaries are no longer capital deductions in the US. I also recall Canada had a startup visa program to bring co-founders to Canada, but that program is paused and I don't know if it really worked.

More than anything, despite all these advantages, I would imagine access to capital is more important to any startup. You can live in the best regulatory environment in the world, and it would mean nothing if you run out of runway. The investment landscape in Canada is hugely conservative overall, and despite being flagged under successive governments that there's a huge death valley between seed to commercialization, no risk has actually been taken to meaningfully address it. [1]

[1]: https://www.bdc.ca/en/about/analysis-research/canada-venture...

If they didn't have it, they could force a total shutdown of the market there.

Canadian investors are much too risk-averse, but they will happily follow a funding round led by an American VC.

Yes, this is exactly what I was describing. The deals here tend to suck and are few. Cohere is the exception that proves the rule, if you ask me.

It's always struck me as a little weird that a company has to be within driving distance of Sand Hill road to get attention from a Silicon Valley VC. VCs can't hop on a flight to do some due diligence? Video conferencing isn't good enough for monthly status meetings?

    > VCs can't hop on a flight to do some due diligence?

Asking them to operate in new jurisdictions requires a lot of effort and legal know-how; it's not just a matter of cutting a check, but understanding how to navigate the legal landscape for these financial transactions, rights of the investor, tax implications, legal recourse, etc. There's going to be a lot of friction such that they'll either: 1) not seek those opportunities, 2) ask the founders to move to the US if it's a really promising team (see this a lot; was in one startup where a co-founder moved from AUS to the US).

Melanie Perkins talks a bit about this in the Canva episode of How I Built This[0] and how SV wanted them to relocate. AUS government ended up matching some of the investment through a new program so they reached their target for their raise.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/26/971813519/canva-melanie-perki...

Economies of scale. Many investors can review and fund a standard Delaware C corporation without even passing it to outside counsel.

For Canada, not only will you probably special counsel, you may also have additional up front and ongoing accounting costs related to tax treatment, et cetera. You also know that this is potentially a hurdle that start-up will face in every sale and supply-chain contract it signs, unless it relents and just chooses a normal jurisdiction, at which point why don't they just create a Delaware entity and headquarter in Canada?

Accounting and legal stuff is going to be farmed out to licensed professionals regardless of where the company is. And you can't tell me there's a shortage of US + Canada tax or legal specialists.

There are a lot of small-shop and even one-man private investors. Increasingly as wealth accumulates and AI automates.

> you can't tell me there's a shortage of US + Canada tax or legal specialists

They're usually a different partner at a big, expensive firm. Or, if you use a small firm, it means establishing a brand new engagement.

I make personal investments. That would be a dealbreaker for me. If I really liked the company I might try to talk a cross-border friend into running a fund that makes the investment so I don't have to deal with the B.S.

Is it actually true as of 2026? Asking because it sounds like a pure cope.

I was under the impression that Silicon Valley VCs have no issues with funding tech companies based in major US tech hubs outside of SV(especially ones like NYC).

Canada/Japan/Germany/etc. is a whole separate story though, and I am not contesting that (given there are plenty of very obvious reasons for why a SV-based VC firm wouldn't want to invest in a company based in one of those places).

In Australia, the R&D credit can be up to a 100 percent of an engineer's salary.

I really wish Canada told American companies to fuck all the way off with that. I hate that we support foreign corporate profits with our tax money. It seems like such a scam. I am sure initially it was meant to help innovation and give small businesses an edge, but somehow the googles and the metas can freely take advantage of it too.

Other than that, Canada is amazing and I miss a lot of aspects.

> Outgoing transfers cost 0.75% of the transaction amount (minimum of $1, maximum of $30). SoFi does not charge a fee for incoming transactions.

> SoFi Plus members save 50%. They pay 0.375% of the transaction amount with a maximum of $15 (minimum remains $1).

https://www.sofi.com/banking/instant-money-transfer

The U.S. invented real-time gross settlement electronic payments with Fedwire in 1915 [1]. FedNow is the newest real-time end-to-end payment system [2]. It launched in 2023.

[1] https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/fedwire

[2] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow-servic...

> FedNow exists but is supported by handful of banks which charge fees to use the feature.

What good is inventing a feature if almost nobody can use it?

The big difference is that the EU has mandated (effectively) fee-free availability to all end users, while the US is only making it available as an infrastructure layer. Most banks don't bother offering any product on top of it, or own-account-transfers for a fee at best as mentioned by GP.

https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/new-payme...

Subscriptions are often done via "direct debit" ( since 1970 ), which is safer than letting anyone take money if they have your details, so that's been a solved problem here for a while too.

The downside is the first-movers problem, where the UK having been ahead a couple of decades ago will now likely be behind for a while, because there isn't so much incentive.

Hopefully not as long as the USA has been behind though!

How so? I just tap my mobile on the terminal just like tapping my debit or credit card. In Norway that works with both Google pay and Vipps.

The advantage with Vipps is that I can also pay other private individuals knowing only their mobile number and the payment is instant.

The only way I would use such a system for purchases would be if the merchant refused debit/credit cards, and even then only if there wasn't an alternative merchant I could use.

We've had a billion discussions on Hacker News about payment rails and it's invariably always a European incredulous that Americans can't/won't do a digital payment instantly and for pennies. These Europeans are typically operating with a mental model where they have cash in a bank account and every transaction gets funded from cash on hand.

Americans - for better or for worse - want longer cycles to pay for their charges and many want rewards for their spend. I don't think it's uncharitable to describe those who pull out debit over credit during a transaction as lower income and higher credit risk than those who prefer credit. (Europeans will decry that this is Americans living beyond their means. Maybe! Maybe.)

But when it comes to business, I've never understood this argument from Europeans. Invoicing works on net-30/60/90 terms. In B2B payments you could reduce payment cost by doing invoicing with instant low-cost payment in 30 days, but incur a different "cost" in cash flow management. Credit card payments are a risk-based financial product that does a magic trick of arbitrage for merchants between a service/good sold and payment received as a net-30 invoice to the cardholder, and you should expect to pay a fee for that. An economy where businesses need to pay each other immediately out of cash-on-hand is less dynamic and less efficient than one where all that cash flow can get smoothed out via payment intermediaries. (Money you have to keep on hand for bills is not being deployed doing other things in the economy - this is inefficient!)

Part of it is "the curse of good enough": the US has had good credit-card style infrastructure for over a century and digital infrastructure since the POTS days. Part of it is that we lost our appetite for anti-trust in the 80s. Part of it is that the price structure of this infrastructure has wormed its way into everything in a way that is difficult to undo without causing high-visibility inconvenience for low-visibility benefit. The good-enough is the enemy of the good.

Germany is another first mover with decades old banking systems and standards. German banks also dragged their feet supporting SEPA Instant or they added additional fees so that barely anybody wanted to use it.

Then the EU stepped in with regulation: If you support classic SEPA transactions, you also have to support SEPA Instant for the same price (which is almost always free for retail banking accounts). And suddenly banks did.

I think the “recent” change allowing merchants to pass along the credit card fees is a step in the right direction.

I think a lot of people would still choose fraud protection for the extra costs, though.

Not to take away from your example, but I was under the impression that transaction fees charged when using a credit card in the US were significantly more than in say, the EU?

Of course the business passes its costs right back to the consumer, but it's not visible to them, while the benefits are.

The government is the only one capable of changing the rules to be included in the list of allowed parties to make it better.

> All U.S. financial institutions (Receiving Depository Financial Institutions or RDFIs) must participate and accept Same Day ACH credit transactions.

> However, sending (originating) Same Day ACH payments is optional for banks and credit unions.

[0]: https://www.nebankmn.com/assets/files/aijt34yD

I've signed up for or seen the contracts for several payment processors across several companies. Rack rate for ACH debit starts at $0.25/trx and goes down to sub-penny at scale. Returns can be high though ($2 per, going down as well).

Edited to add: that's not a defense, I *loathe* ACH. It's a negative-reporting system which is such a pain to deal with.

What I can say is the Fed has draconian rules for pricing its services. The services cannot be subsidized but must be priced to recover costs, including a return on capital similar to what a private payment system (ie from the Clearinghouse) would expect.

I read it as the sending institution pays 5.2 cents to the receiving institution per item, on top of the 0.35c/item + 0.1c/item same-day surcharge for a maximum of 5.65 cents/item before volume discounts.

In the USA, no single regulator have that power. Basically only congress can do something like this. The us Congress ain't famous for being fast, you know.

The countries that have innovated the most in regards to automated payments are the ones trying to escape US influence: look at PIX in Brazil, BRICS pay, etc...

In America, the payment system is an oligarchy, they protect their own (the bankers), what need is there for innovation when they are making a killing out of the current inefficiency?

The one place where the US haven't been slow is in stablecoins, making them dollar donominated, to ensure the monopoly the US dollar has on international trade stays strong. That way, when the US has a crisis, they take down the rest of the world too, to the joy of non-US countries.

For other examples, look at adoption of login.gov vs id.me, and tax filing software solutions.

Because why would Musk possibly be interested in saving money and making the government run more efficiently?

What an egotistical ass hat.

Pricing for customers varies by network participant. The network prices are cheap.

The real problem is that, even if costs were to come down to zero, there is nothing incentivizing banks to actually make RTP available to their customers. In the EU, customer-initiated "push" bank transfers are considered an essential part of a checking account; in the US, they're not.

A very important point is that debit cards offer consumer protections (chargebacks for unsatisfactory goods). FedNow, Zelle, wires, ACH do not and people have lost money by scams this way.

If you don't need it right that second, same-day ACH is widely used, and again the delay allows more efficient netting.

The Clearing House's CHIPS is a good in-between, it's not guaranteed instant, but uses an algorithm to match transactions as fast as possible with constrained float.

Purchases are an afterthought. A system like Brazil's Pix could be rolled out on top of FedNow.

Why? At least 2/3 of my cards do same-day ACH (the other is at the same bank, so I can't tell), so the transaction clears in hours. The point of a large credit limit (supposed to be at least 3x normal spend) is so that it doesn't matter anyway.

>FedNow could enable all of this.

Clearing House's RTP has been around since 2017 and it hasn't.

A non-hypothetical scenario is that I make a credit card payment via ACH. That money does not leave my account until EOD. Some other transaction causes my balance to fall below the amount required for that transfer. The transfer fails and I am dinged for a missed payment by the CC company (and if the bank sucks they charge a fee too).

Now you could argue this is an accounting issue "Why doesn't the bank reserve the funds until the transfer is complete?" Answer, I don't know ask Capital One. But RTP eliminates the question entirely.

This is a thing already in the UK. I can make a credit card payment from my account using the credit card number. It applies to the balance in real time (realistically in minutes). I don't have to worry that the payment could fail at any point.

Because transaction ordering isn't guaranteed. Say I know that I'm getting paid on the 1st, and I want to spend my paycheck immediately on rent. If the rent transfer gets processed at 11:00 and the payroll provider gets around to doing it at 11:15, I don't want my rent to be rejected.

Therefore, the bank allows transactions to happen and only checks at the end of day for overdraft. They then apply a time-independent ordering to transactions they can reject like paper checks.

In fact, this same scheme applies to banks, Fed only looks at their accounts at end of day, why you have overnight funding.

The major exception to this is debit cards, which Congress made them reject if the money isn't there at time of authorization.

My broker credits me for deposits immediately, switch brokers.

> I want to pay off a credit card and have that payment clear instantly.

Why? There is zero benefit to doing this, a credit card payment is applied to the account on the day you choose to pay it, whether it is removed from your checking account or not. I guess I could see if you are constantly over drafting your account, but you could just .. keep cash in the account so you don’t overdraft.

I leave enough money in my checking account to cover all auto paid bills for at least 30 days just in case I end up in the hospital or something.

Both are a very poor alternative to something like UPI or even EU-style bank transfers as a mass retail payment system. Cards are orders of magnitudes more expensive; Zelle has no standardized interface and is explicitly geared only towards P2P Payments, lest it cannibalizes the banks' golden goose, i.e. payment cards.

> same-day ACH is widely used, and again the delay allows more efficient netting.

Importantly, customer-initiated/"push" ACH is largely not a thing in the US, unlike in many other countries. This is what people unfamiliar with the US landscape often have a hard time understanding.

> A very important point is that debit cards offer consumer protections (chargebacks for unsatisfactory goods). FedNow, Zelle, wires, ACH do not and people have lost money by scams this way.

That's the crux of it: The US seems to be culturally unwilling to accept the risks (fraud) and rewards (practically free P2P and B2C payments) that come with a customer-initiated/push payment system.

My point is that these properly designed national systems should also be considered in the USA as well, and not dismissed because something is kind of working right now with a long list of exceptions to a good and safe experience.

https://www.chargeback.io/blog/debit-card-chargebacks-guide

Liability is covered under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act

> You have zero liability if you report before any unauthorized charges are made. Reporting within two business days caps your liability at $50. However, if you wait over two business days but less than 60 calendar days after your statement is sent, your maximum liability jumps to $500. Beyond 60 days, you could be liable for all unauthorized charges.

Worldwide.

Most debit cards today have PIN, but that doesn't waive fraud or theft protections. If I purchase something online the purchase of course has my permission. If the goods are faulty or not delivered, then that is fraud and has chargeback protection. Even if you used your PIN, even if you used two factor authentication.

https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp

Zelle is pseudo real time. The settlement (mostly/often?) happens by ACH.

https://www.cjsoi.com/articles/fednow-vs-rtp-vs-ach

US bank has it, Mercury does as well

Like all things from any government -- let's see how the rollout goes. But I am cautiously happy to hear about this.

Both places are better now but I remember being in the US in the 2010s and having an easier time using my bank card to get cash than an American far away from their credit union. In Japan in 2012 I also sometimes used my Canadian bank card when my Japanese bank was closed for a holiday (this was fixed in 2015).

Like all things... human???

/s

"To rail someone" means to have vigorous sex with someone. I believe the poster to whom you replied was making a joke about the name being unfortunate.

Naming is hugely important. I'm always catching downvotes on here for complaining about otherwise-decent open source projects that will never gain traction because they have moronic names like Xonaly or whatever. But I suspect "hey can you rail me 20 bucks" won't be how it gets referred to, and "I don't have cash, does e-transfer work?" will continue to be how it's referred to.

Acxsys [1] was launched by the Canadian banks in 1996 as a for-profit startup meant to develop online payment solutions, and they original launched the service as "certapay".

Acxsys was folded into Interac in 2018, but I think it was somewhat prior to that the certapay name was discontinued in favour of "email money transfer". Everyone called them e-transfers though, and so eventually Interac gave up on EMT and just went with that name, which is what it is now: https://www.interac.ca/en/resources/personal-resources/perso...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac#History

As an aside, there was an e-purse pilot sometime between 1996-1998 in Southern Ontario. It may have been Visa or MC driven rather than Interact/Acxsys.

I remember seeing a booth at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1996 where they demoed a smart card that could be used for web transactions (!) using a floppy drive adaptor (!!).

1990s fintech was wild.

> The initial cohort of active RTR system participants includes: Wealthsimple, Questbank, Peoples Trust Company, Paramount Commerce, KOHO, DoBusiness.com™, Digital Commerce Bank, Bank of America,

* https://globalnews.ca/news/12142666/real-time-rail-payments-...

This is the hope of something like RTR - for anyone who can meet the participation requirements, an ability to operate independently of a banking partner who might be your direct competition.

> Participants will be added to the RTR in three phases to help control the volume of transactions added to the system, with the goal of including every Canadian financial institution on the rail by mid-2027.

> The major banks – which will shift massive amounts of volume onto the RTR – are not involved in the first phase of the rollout, but will join in the second and third phases.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-payments-ca...

It does sound like it's for consumers as well

The last bastion of cash, for me, here is garage sales. Absolutely everything else has gone cashless, but low-friction, low dollar transfers between individuals is still ruled by cash. Not that I haven't paid for stuff via Interac e-transfer but that has high friction (log into bank app, add one-time payee etc.) so only for cases where suitable cash isn't on hand.

To contrast, Interac, the system used for canadian debit and person to person transfers, is a private company, with ownership by the banks.

If you look at their "about us" section, they just say they are "a corporation". https://www.payments.ca/about/who-we-are Although they were created by a law (Canada Payments Act) and have a public mandate:

Payments Canada has formed a critical part of Canada’s financial market infrastructure for over four decades. The Canadian Payments Association was created by the Canadian Payments Association Act in 1980, now known as the Canadian Payments Act (CP Act).

I always viewed it as one of the "we will govern and regulate ourself so government doesn't fully have to" bodies, but I'm an outsider so happy to be corrected :).

People in Brazil can simply generate a one time PIX code or use own key and instantly receive. It is now the most used payment mode for more than a hundred million people... this is why Trump attacked the Brazilian financial system as unfair with North American payment systems.

Yes, it can have no cost, receiver can have no cost, payer need not to have a hidden cost at price tag and it can save billions of dollars and make products and services circulate more, warming economy , reducing unemployment and avoiding money dump to external countries for the local enterpreneurs.

E-transfer was launched 17 years before Pix so it runs on email addresses as an identifier. In my experience most people use e-transfer more often than cash for person to person and many small businesses like farm stands, etc.

As a physical person, you can receive 30 Pix payments per month without having to pay a fee, but send as many as you please.

A business however can be obliged to pay fees for receiving Pix payments from physical persons (ie customers), and when using the more advanced Pix features.

Banks very likely choose to not put any fees on Pix payments for their business clients for now, since it's beneficial to keep their money flowing in. But that's not different than European SEPA payments or American ACH payments being "free" for businesses.

From what I can tell, e-transfers will continue using interac's network, so I'm not sure if this will benefit users at all. Depends if banks integrate a new user-facing money transfer option. I suspect it'll take years if not decades for banking institutions to roll this out to users, though they may use this behind the scenes for inter-institutional transfers without Interac.

Someone who's more knowledgeable about Canadian banking and payment processing, feel free to jump in here because I'd like to know more as well.

RTR's membership requirements are set by PayCan, who have a mandate to foster competition. Any FinTech who can meet requirements can, in theory, hold a settlement account on RTR and participate. Interac has an incentive to keep the club small, so to speak, and prevent new up-and-comers from cannibalizing their market share.

From a competition lens, the hope here is that RTR levels the playing field for both the big banks and fintechs and opens the door to a lot more consumer-facing innovation. That will, of course, depend on the network effect and who gets onboard.

quote from the page:

As Interac e-Transfer payments begin to clear and settle on the RTR, we will put this world-class infrastructure to work for consumers and businesses.” Jeremy Wilmot, President and CEO Interac Corp.

Good enough for consumer to consumer use and some online use cases, but definitely not good enough for retail.

Or giving up and saying "alright, I guess I'll trust you and hope the money comes soon"

Credit cards just have incredible lockin.

Venmo and iMessage are actually more annoying than you might think. Both silo your funds and you'll have to pay significant fees for instant withdrawals to your bank account, while regular withdrawals take at least a day.

Zelle is a bit better since it draws/deposits directly from/to your checking account, but most banks' UX is moderately to extremely janky.

You can't switch to alternative apps that use Venmo, and if your network of people uses Venmo, you can't use a different money transfer network.

That's predicated on there being a better bank UI in the first place. Venmo's UI is far more consumer-friendly than any bank's Zelle payment UI that I know of.

It's like the difference between Twitter as the UI/UX leader (humour me and assume that part is true) stomping all over the market due to the network effect, and the ability for Mastodon instances to compete for the best UI/UX.

The Venmos of the world have all the incentive to improve their UI, because they don't have anything else drawing customers to them and causing them to stay.

PS - Twitter is more important than ever in terms of driving the news, while the last time Bluesky or Mastodon broke the news on anything was March 32nd of twenty twenty-never. Mastodon instances stand out mostly in their ability to self-immolate over the latest Maoist struggle session. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>

Sure, but that's not in opposition to my point. I'm saying that for any individual, switching banks for money-sending is much easier than switching from e.g. Venmo to Apple Pay, because at least half the people you know don't know anything about Apple Pay.

> The Venmos of the world have all the incentive to improve their UI, because they don't have anything else drawing customers to them and causing them to stay.

The network effect. If you're in the US, you use Venmo because everyone else uses Venmo.

> PS - Twitter is more important than ever in terms of driving the news [...]

Yes, my analogy works with that. Twitter is Venmo. Everyone is on Twitter/Venmo because that's where the network effects are.

https://www.redcompasslabs.com/insights/why-canada-needs-ano... was something I found via a search that explains some of the nuance without writing a new post on the topic, other citations and resources are welcome.

(it should be expected that newer, utility ran instant payment systems cannibalize existing, more expensive, lower speed payment rails; going fast and being cheap as a utility is the innovation)

Same day ach launched with a user fee, so they usually prompt to confirm and offer to send it via normal ach instead, which I find amusing?

I also see instant transfer support at some other places I bank. I can't say if bill payment happens instantly or not, my finances don't run close to the edge, and I don't need to know exactly when a bill pay (which I generally schedule) is taken out and when it's applied; as long as both happen, I'm good.

https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/fed...

(i am contributing subject matter expertise to policymakers to make offering FedNow rails to financial services customers a requirement of having a banking license, so I'm a bit biased; this is the only way we'll get off of closed payment rails like Zelle, slow open rails like ACH, or expensive faster legacy credit card rails)

> Are bill payments and bank to bank transfers now happening instantaneously?

Walmart is currently rolling it out. I expect others to start to as you see them surcharge credit card payments (US mobile phone providers, internet providers, etc). It's trivial to build into an app experience, with or without a partner like Plaid (for example).

> “It surprised me,” Henry said of adoption of Walmart’s first iteration of pay-by-bank, which is available online but hasn’t been marketed to customers. “It’s certainly surpassed our expectations of the amount of customers that have registered and actually use the payment type.”

> Walmart’s upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv’s NOW Network, which integrates with The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow. Until now, large retailers hesitated to launch real time payment options because many banks were not connected to an instant settlement system, meaning their customers would not be able to use the product. NOW Network aims to connect to as many banks as possible to reach 100% of deposit accounts by combining its own network with RTP and FedNow.

Walmart Plans Instant Bank Payments, Cutting Out Card Networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41593450 - September 2024 (3 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632105 (additional citations)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433164 (additional citations)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clearing_House

https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/tch

RTP has ~1260 participants as of mid 2026.

https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp/RTP-Par...

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow-servic... maintains a list of banks and financial service providers currently on FedNow rails.

> How long does it take for an online payment to reach a biller?

> We recommend scheduling your payments to be made at least 5 business days prior to the actual payment due date on the bill. Scheduling your payments sufficiently in advance of the due date allows enough time for the biller to receive the payment and credit it to your account.

https://info.bankofamerica.com/en/digital-banking/online-bil...

Adding a biller to it involves typing in the biller name, providing the account number (e.g. your credit card number) and the ZIP where your bills say to mail a check.

Big billers (like say, Chase credit cards) register with the other big banks and the handful of companies who provide white-labeled platforms for all the small banks and credit unions so that when you input one of their accounts this way, it'll match it up and turn into an electronic transfer which tends to show up pretty quickly (though I assume it does still take a couple of days to fully clear, you'll usually "get credit for it" the day of the payment).

But you can also just add literally any person or company name and address. Say, Bob Smith, 123 Example Street, City, ST 12345 and they'll just mail Bob a check on your behalf. So, those will always require days of time because they have to print and mail a physical check in those cases.

So, the generic advice has to assume it's not matched to an electronic biller profile.

In the case of most banks I've used, they hide this implementation detail slightly -- they just always have you pick the date the payment 'will be received' - and when it's not an electronic biller, you just can't pick a date that's too close.

If you pay a bill on the 1st, the money does not land in the payees account that day (barring in person cash transactions). Best case scenario, funds are available on the 2nd to the payee, although, more commonly, it is several days before the funds are settled. Banks will frequently paper over this showing the funds where they will eventually go, but the clearing house still hasn't finished. If you try to spend too much of that unsettled money, the bank will be glad to inform you that the money isn't actually available yet.

When people talk about instant payments they mean a few seconds, not overnight -maybe.

I used to be in charge of a payments dev team that oversaw several billion dollars of bill payments per year. There is nothing instant about moving money in the US.

The faster merchants offer instant payments for making payments for free and surcharge credit card rails for payments (to cover the exorbitant cost), the faster volume moves over (imho).

Brazil's Pix (https://whatispix.com/) is what desired target end state looks like imho.

Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052371 - May 2026 (383 comments)

What are the provisions for privacy - preventing my every financial transaction, and thus everything I do involving money, from being centrally tracked, and shared with private institutions?

And what about for preventing government from cutting people off from the financial system (without a court order)? Edit: The US government already commonly does it with non-citizens in the context of other financial systems.

At least, how does that work with FedNow if not Canada's RTR?

EDIT: (clarified and reorganized)

Access to your personal information is governed by PIPEDA for private entities and the Privacy Act for government entities. Additionally each province has its own version of the Privacy Act. Since most of the big banks are headquartered in Toronto, the Ontario's Privacy Act (FIPPA) may also have some jurisdiction but not clear.

The government can cut you off as easily as Binance asking other platforms to block transactions when called upon, for example. If you don't want to be blocked, use cash or other bearer instruments. Every other traditional finance or crypto ecosystem has a throat to choke. Show me the financial services consumer persona and use cases and I'll walk through the attack path to cut their access to the financial system, as someone who has contributed to building financial infrastructure both in traditional finance, capital markets, and crypto rails for traditional folks.

> That is a function of the legal framework and government regulations of each country

I want to add that it can also be built in on a technical level. Some cryptocurrency already does it (I'm not advocating unregulated monetary systems or blockchain technology, I'm just saying it's possible and already done). For example, transactions could be anonymized, with PKI-type keys available only with a court order.

https://xkcd.com/538/

I think govermnment and tech leaders greatly underestimate demand for privacy (confidentiality). People in polls consistently say they are worried about government and corporate surveillance and want privacy; you can see the response to Flock cameras right now. Apple, the most successful computer company, clearly sees demand for it, devotes extensive engineering to it, and markets products on that basis. People in other places (e.g., the EU) have passed laws with much greater privacy protection.

The public doesn't understand what's happening - how they are tracked (e.g., all electronic monetary transactions) and what the power/impact of that surveillance is - and they are givin no path forward but to submit. When they have a path (again, Flock, Apple, other countries), they take it. They need tech people to take the lead, educate people in plain English (not 'PKI', etc.), and develop options technical and political - politicians generally are non-technical too.

The solutions require both legal and technical components. With no technical limitation - if data is open on the laptops of everyone in the legal / finance / national security communities - the legal constraints won't work; people will use the data anyway. If there is no legal restriction, they'll obtain access anyway.

Looks like everything will pass through a single clear text layer managed by the Canadian Government.

India's UPI and Brazil's Pix are better examples.

but you do need a device to read the phone right? to support all kind of difffent payment system. compare to a simple picutre printed QR code, which one is more convenient?

Same way you can tap your credit card on their phone to pay them. It's the same protocol, just with biometrics on the buyer's phone so the limit is $50k instead of $10k

i see no better than a phone(any phone) + payment app + qr code. no need to carry the credit card.

A credit card, an iPhone behaving like a credit card (AKA apple pay), and an android phone are all using the same protocol. Why don't you just try it? Pretty much every grocery store, gas station, etc accepts tap to pay. Any phone or card will work with any terminal. Like I said, the only difference between a card and a phone is that the latter has a $50k limit instead of just $10k.

> "Payment rail" is a very long established term og art.

Yes, by all means, use the existing terms internally, but when you launch things, remember you work in somewhat of a bubble, and figure out names that make sense to people. 99% of the people aren't gonna know about "payment rails", and when they hear "rails", they either think about trains, or they're a programmer and starts thinking about Ruby. And then of course there is a third group of people, like the ones that say "Payment rail is actually an established term".

"Payment rail" is a very long established term og art.

> Yes, by all means, use the existing terms internally, but when you launch things, remember you work in somewhat of a bubble, and figure out names that make sense to people.

This is to be used by people in the same bubble, and it does make sense, it's about as descriptive as it could be.

Unfortunately its utility is curtailed severely if your bank doesn't trust your mobile OS (LineageOS, for me). For security purposes, my bank (RBC) triggers identity checks every time I try to send an EMT, and even after sending selfies, drivers licences, etc. — it still rejects the transfer.

So, security at the cost of all utility.

I have now resorted to transferring money between my accounts using paper cheques... like it's the 90s. If somehow they deny me cheque deposits I'll have to use an ATM and walk the money to the other bank. Given how there are now banks that don't even have branches, this could be a major problem in the future.

This Real-Time Rail system sounds promising, but that's not the link that'll kill it for everyone.

I've moved funds ranging from 10k to $1m between banks in Canada much more than once, and every single time, I go to one and get a draft and drive that draft over to the destination bank. It's just easier...and its absurd.

This might be true in Canada too: the real estate industry down here is entirely dependent on wire transfers, and yet they are absolutely terrified of wire scams. Maybe if FedNow had existed when I bought my place, I could have gotten a draft slip from my bank and driven it over to the title company.

You, as a technically savvy user, could choose to use a dedicated device with an acceptable security posture for your electronic transfers.

Not really, I'm forced to use e.g. RBC because that's where my employer sends their matched retirement savings funds.

This can easily be launched from the command line via args, when needed.

Unless you let all the tracking scripts, and auth scripts load, it thinks you're evil.

I don't send anything from TD, but if I buy anything online half the time it forces a 2FA which requires signing into the app and confirming the transaction. I imagine signing into the app might not work nicely if I was on LineageOS.

Sometimes I think that the slow speed of moving money is a feature, not a bug.

oh no

The US federal government also released their own version of this in 2023 (US FedNow).

It's been an obvious next step for a while now.

1. Reachability matters more than speed — SEPA Inst was technically live years before most PSPs actually supported it. A real-time rail no-one connects to is just a slower rail with marketing.

2. ISO 20022 as the message format was the right call but underestimated operationally. Smaller banks and PSPs still struggle with the schema's flexibility — same transaction encoded two different "valid" ways is a real integration tax. Canada using 20022 from day one is smart; publishing strict usage guidelines beats expecting consensus.

This happens all the time.

If payment is instant, what that has to mean is that the funds are actually made available to me right away. If you transfer $1000 to me on Monday, and 10 minutes later I've drained my account of funds and disappeared, how can that be "reversed"? Is one of our banks going to just eat it?

If payment is "instant, but the funds are held for several days and can't be spent or transferred" then the payment isn't instant in any meaningful way.

The point is they know a transfer cannot be reversed, especially when the money has been spent already.

Even a bank who sent out £130M [0] in error to multiple people still cannot recover all of it after 4 years.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/30/santander-b...

So you have not made a point here.

Wasn't that almost 5 years ago - was it the same government? Is there reason to believe it's the Liberals and not the prime minister at the time, or that the Conservatives would be different?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poec-report-released-friday...

So hey, maybe we should trust the government (who does all federal payment systems) with a new federal payment system.

Payments Canada is a corporation fully owned by the government and overseen by the Department of Finance. It was formed by an Act of Parliament. Short of rolling it into the department of finance it couldn't be more of a government effort.

Also, the small partners are the launch partners. The Big 6 are part of the second phase of rollout in 2027. The projection is that 90% of all canadian bank accounts will be covered in the next year.

* The real-time clearing and settlement component

* The real-time exchange component

* Third party exchanges flowing through the clearing and settlement component

* Centralized fraud solution

https://www.payments.ca/systems-services/payment-systems/rea...

This is a good step. But the devil is in the details.

And I don't see the details that matter the most:

* Network effects: will it be widespread (from city buses to fruit stands)? Compared to UPI and Pix, Interact has a pathetic history of adoption. What sets RTR apart from Interact?

* Friction: Will it be instantaneous and free of charge? Can it be used by illiterate persons? QR codes? NFC tags?

In Brazil/India those payments systems are used by the most informal of agents: fortune tellers, prostitutes, merchants in crime ridden favelas, ... This is what real mass adoption looks like.

Its early to say if this new payment system will be "Canada's Pix" or not, but to me it seems that's the direction they're going:

- The release statement takes great pains to make it clear the payment system is "instantaneous" or "within a few seconds", unlike Interac - Same ISO standard as Pix - Some sort of centralization (they just say "centralized fraud prevention"; I'm assuming that means some sort of BoC coordination. Also: "exchanges flowing through the clearing and settlement component")

And most importantly, unlike Interac (a private company), this comes from a quasi-public company with a clear government mandate.

> With additional participants onboarding continually in the coming months, including all major Canadian financial institutions and other members applying for access, the RTR will be available to more than nine in 10 Canadians within the first year after launch.