Thank you very much for hearing me.
I am the president of Telpay Incorporated, a bill payment service company that I started in 1985. I was also the founder of Comcheq Services Limited, a payroll service company that started in 1968. In both cases, these operations involved the processing of data, but also, rather uniquely at the time, they involved the distribution of the funds generated from that data.
The requirement of our doing so is that we must maintain those funds in a trust account. That's an inefficiency that is really quite significant, maybe even surprising. At least $2 billion of corporate working capital is tied up in those trust funds in various companies such as ours and payroll companies—$2 billion of working capital, free working capital that could be released with suitable changes in the payment system.
The Department of Finance has made some excellent advances in that regard. In fact, the change made in the month of September has opened up the opportunity to diminish greatly those trust funds, because the payments that are made today can be obtained today, and so there isn't that float that is really quite costly to business.
In terms of what you're trying to achieve, efficiency and steps toward the future of the payment industry could be dealt with by implementing the changes, which are really fairly simple, I believe. We'd like you to recommend that the Department of Finance look at these changes.
Thanks.