Reshaping how organizations exchange payments with Payments Canada

Across Canada, financial institutions are navigating several challenges—including difficult market conditions, increasing costs, and global economic uncertainty—that make focusing on affordability, accessibility, and technology even more important. McKinsey works with several financial services providers to help them better meet Canadians’ evolving needs.

Technology is reshaping how global consumers, businesses, governments, and financial systems are exchanging payments. Payments Canada—a not-for-profit, public-purpose organization that operates the payment infrastructure on which the Canadian financial system relies—engaged McKinsey to help it set its long-term vision. To do so, we helped them do the following:

• Convene more than 100 payments ecosystem stakeholders—including banks, small businesses, large corporations, and government organizations—in interviews and workshops to understand needs and constraints
• Analyze global consumer and payments data and identify forward-looking payment trends that would affect Canada’s payment system, using McKinsey’s industry-leading Global Payments Map
• Translate data and insights into a series of steps to envision a long-term plan for a more secure and efficient national payments infrastructure