Evidence of meeting #21 for Finance in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was card.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Mauril Bélanger Liberal Ottawa—Vanier, ON
Has our financial consumer protection agency been into that as well?
Commissioner, Executive Services, Financial Consumer Agency of Canada
That is one of the risks we raised in our paper. The risks are fraud, misuse, identity theft, and misuse of assets. It's something that's really not within our purview, but we'll be following it.
Commissioner, Executive Services, Financial Consumer Agency of Canada
That's a good question.
Liberal
Acting Vice-President, Policy and Operations, Canadian Bankers Association
If I may suggest, you might want to talk to the institute for advanced computing near the University of Waterloo. They are the leaders in this technology. They could probably give you a sense.
Liberal
Mauril Bélanger Liberal Ottawa—Vanier, ON
I know they are, but they're not a government institute. Whose purview is it within under the government?
Commissioner, Executive Services, Financial Consumer Agency of Canada
I don't know.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Usually I just moderate the discussion. I'm only supposed to answer procedural questions.
Liberal
Mauril Bélanger Liberal Ottawa—Vanier, ON
I understand that, Mr. Chairman. That wasn't fair. Perhaps it's something the committee may want to consider.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
I think I know the answer to that, but I'll endeavour to get that for everyone.
Conservative
Conservative
Gerald Keddy Conservative South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS
Mr. Chairman, you actually asked the question I was going to ask, but my colleague Mr. Saxton has a different question.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
Thanks, Chair.
It's actually along similar lines to Mr. Bélanger's questions for Mr. Cumming regarding security.
Your system is based on a cloud network, or whatever you call it. There seems to be a lot of apprehension among people still today about where that information goes, where that information is stored, whether or not it could be hacked. We've seen a lot of hacking activity coming from Asia, for example.
What can you tell people to give them more confidence that a cloud-based system is safe and secure?
Executive Vice-President, Technology and Operations, SecureKey Technologies Inc.
Part of it is that the world has sort of shifted from closed networks where security was very tight to these open networks that are highly interconnected, and that has created a lot of complexity. From a user perspective, I think keeping your organization and organizations that you've established trust with safe is first and foremost the best way to protect that data. People need to be conscious of how they use their data across the Internet. When you send your data to Joe's Flowers, it's not the same as storing it at TD Bank.
When you think about a cloud, the organizations like ours, that have invested in providing security infrastructure through a cloud, spend a lot more time thinking about how to protect that data than do the small independent businesses that also store the same kind of sensitive information.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
I believe there have been some large retailers that have been hacked, even recently.
Executive Vice-President, Technology and Operations, SecureKey Technologies Inc.
For sure.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
That sort of goes counter to your argument about small versus large. Large isn't always better. Bigger isn't always better.
Executive Vice-President, Technology and Operations, SecureKey Technologies Inc.
It certainly isn't their area of expertise in all cases. I think the Target experience says that it just simply isn't their area of expertise and they're looking at organizations that have addressed the issue for different ways of handling payment data.
Conservative
Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC
Is there anything more you want to say about your new service, briidge.net exchange?