A new era is emerging in Canada: Consumers will soon be able to securely share their financial data with authorized third parties — including fintechs, platforms, retailers, and new categories — powering fresh opportunities, including some we’ve never seen before. Open banking will be the driver of these changes.
The law enabling open banking in Canada came into force in March 2026. There are still steps we must pass through before it becomes an everyday reality (the Real-Time Rail has to be up and running before open banking can happen, for example). But I believe when change finally comes, it will come fast.
We’ve seen versions of this play out elsewhere — in India, Brazil and beyond — and the pattern is always the same: when the rails open, change is not gradual. It’s a flood.
For Canadian merchants, the question isn’t whether open banking will change the payment landscape, it’s whether they’ll be positioned ahead of it. Companies should be asking themselves now: Are we ready? (And what’s the risk if we’re not?)
Consumer experience around consent and control, security and trust will decide which organizations thrive in this new era. As we build Konek at here at Interac, Canada’s new way to pay online, backed by Canada’s leading financial institutions, this is top of mind.
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Talk to a specialistWhat is open banking?
Open banking lets consumers and small businesses securely share their financial data including account information, transaction history, spending profiles and more, with approved third-party providers via standardized APIs. It replaces riskier workarounds like screen scraping (where users hand over banking credentials to third-party apps) with secure, consent-based data connections.
Open banking allows consumers and small businesses to securely transfer their data among financial (and other service) providers, which can facilitate the offering of financial services products that meet their needs. Participating consumers and small businesses control who can see their financial data by granting and revoking access.
Under the supervision of the Bank of Canada, which took over the lead role from the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada in late 2025, the government has set a firm two-stage roadmap. Phase 1, which technically began with the royal assent of the Consumer Driven Banking Act (but again, cannot truly begin until the Real-Time Rail launches), enables read-access data sharing. Phase 2 (expected in 2027) introduces write access, unlocking payment initiation and account switching.
While Canada may be rolling out open banking behind many of its peer countries, we have natural advantages that will help us catch up, including strong infrastructure, strong incumbents and high baseline trust in financial institutions. As open banking makes consumer experiences more digital and less dependent on face-to-face interactions at bank branches, the risk is that the trust will erode even if the institution remains.
The challenge, then, is to build open banking experiences for consumers that will sustain the trust they have in their financial institutions and products and carry that over into fully digital, data-driven, automated environments.
The winning factors? Consent and control, security, trust
Sustaining consumers’ trust is a key factor to bear in mind as we develop experiences for them. I believe this will determine who wins in an open banking marketplace.
Those of us who have been involved in product development may be tempted to focus on UX; my two decades of experience tell me that better onboarding, better flows and a better experience are often the factors that drive a product to success.
But when everyone has great UX, UX stops differentiating — it becomes a requirement, a hygiene factor; necessary, but not sufficient. When everyone has convenience, convenience stops mattering.
And when it comes to open banking, the question of whether or not to engage with a service is about something deeper. We’re asking consumers to do something fundamentally new. We’re asking them to open access to their financial life. When consumers are being asked to share their financial data, factors like control and security naturally come to the forefront.
When is customer confidence won or lost?
Four critical moments:
1
Consent
Asking for access: You build buy-in with transparency and respect. A checkbox can lose it immediately.
2
Transparency
When data is used, consumers will notice. Silence creates suspicion. Explanation builds confidence.
3
Failure
When things go wrong, fast recovery and ownership build loyalty. Deflection destroys it.
4
Control
People need to feel they have agency. Visible control matters, even if it’s rarely used.
I’ll give you an example. Early in my career, I was part of a team building what we imagined would be a truly intelligent digital assistant — not one that just answered questions, but one that could act on your behalf in the world. A system that understood your preferences so deeply, and your behaviour so well, that it could anticipate your needs before you’d even articulated them.
Internally, we called the vision a “perfect butler”: a trusted, almost invisible assistant with judgment, discretion and autonomy. You wouldn’t need to instruct it step by step — you’d simply trust it to do things for you, and get it right.
In practice, that meant concrete tasks like making purchases and managing household needs and booking appointments. The device promised to reduce friction from everyday life and replace it with seamless convenience.
The technical execution was promising, and so was the consumer reaction when we tested the concept. Who wouldn’t want to have an automated assistant?
Yet when the assistant product became real — when it actually started making decisions and taking actions without explicit approval at every step — something changed. People became uncomfortable. Not because the outcomes were bad — in many cases the decisions were excellent, often better than what users would have chosen themselves. The issue wasn’t quality. It was control.
Having a machine make their decisions created a sense of unease in people. We saw it directly in behaviour: People set strict spending limits. They disabled features they had previously said they wanted. They insisted on confirmation steps we had assumed would be unnecessary.
What we had underestimated was not capability. It was trust.
The lesson: People want to feel in control of what’s happening on their behalf, and that concern trumps convenience.
“People want to feel in control of what’s happening on their behalf, and that concern trumps convenience.”
I think we can apply that lesson to open banking, where consent must be explicit and the protections real, but the psychological dynamic could still pose a challenge.
That’s why Canadian entities should focus on the consent experience: to ensure consumers understand what’s happening with their data, with assurances around security and consent. The front-runners will not be the ones who offer the most options. They will be the ones people trust enough to choose.
The Konek perspective
I believe real differentiation in the marketplace comes from a deep place. It comes from the control, security and trust I just mentioned. That’s why with Konek, we’re building a solution that will offer online retailers a real advantage over the long run.
“At Konek, we are not just building something that sits on top of financial institution infrastructure. We are building something that is deeply embedded within it. And that distinction matters.”
Today, our focus is to improve online checkout payment experience. With Konek, customers authenticate through a participating financial institution, which helps reduce friction, lower false declines — a major but often invisible source of conversion loss in e-commerce — and increase confidence that both their money and their data are being protected.
But online checkout is only the tip of the iceberg.
We’re not just building something that sits on top of financial institution infrastructure. We are building a solution that is deeply embedded within it. And that distinction matters. It enables delivery of value that is not only convenient, but meaningfully secure, reliable and trusted by design.
Over time, what you’ll see is how we plan to systematically leverage this position to bring higher levels of trust into contexts where it is currently lacking, and to embed that directly into the product experience in a way that drives real customer preference. We believe we’re well positioned to offer merchants a checkout experience that gives consumers the control, security and ultimately trust that they’re looking for.
The merchants who move now, with the right partners, will have a structural advantage that won’t be easy to replicate. Because trust is not just a feature of payments. It is the foundation layer that sits underneath the entire financial interaction stack.
Because increasingly, the question for consumers isn’t, “What’s the most convenient option?” It’s: “Which option can I rely on to be reliable and secure, and to give me control?”
