Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for the invitation to appear today.
As Payments Canada's chief delivery officer, I lead large-scale delivery programs, including Canada's real-time rail and its central fraud services. I have over 35 years of experience in transforming financial technology and operations.
Payments Canada owns and operates the critical national payments infrastructure—the systems, rules and standards that help keep Canada's economy moving. Established by the Canadian Payments Act, we are a national public-purpose organization that operates on a non-profit basis. Our board of directors is majority-independent, and the Minister of Finance is responsible for our enabling legislation.
Our systems, which are overseen by the Bank of Canada, include Lynx, Canada's high-value payment system, used by participants to clear and settle primarily wire payments and large-value payments; the automated clearing settlement system, ACSS, which clears and settles retail batch payments, like direct deposits and debits; and Canada's forthcoming real-time rail, which I will speak to in a moment.
In 2025, our system safely cleared and settled $103 trillion among institutions. Our vision is to enable prosperity, productivity and safety for Canada through trusted, world-class payments. Our legislated public policy objectives are to promote the efficiency, safety and soundness of our systems.
Our perspective on fraud requires a clarification on the unique role we play. Payments Canada's systems, rules and standards allow our system participants, including financial institutions, payment service providers and credit unions, to move funds safely between one another. We do not hold, have visibility to or manage any individual customer bank accounts, nor do we see any private data. However, as fraud threats evolve, we all have a role.
Our own research reinforces the rate at which fraud threats are growing. These threats are not evenly distributed across Canada's demographics, often targeting Canada's most vulnerable.
Fraud arises through multiple channels, sectors and parties. There's no single solution nor institution that can solve it in isolation. This is why Payments Canada strongly supports the Government of Canada's establishment of the financial crimes agency and its commitment to develop a national anti-fraud strategy.
Our consultation submission on that strategy emphasizes the need for purpose-driven data sharing across sectors; coordinated regulation and oversight to ensure fair, predictable outcomes across industries; and strengthened, collaborative consumer education.
Payments Canada is also an active member of the Canadian anti-scam coalition.
Our biggest contribution to the fight against fraud, and a centrepiece of Canada's payment infrastructure innovation, is Canada's real-time rail, or RTR, which is launching in Q4 of this year with centralized fraud services. Combined with broader access to our membership and systems, the RTR will enable competition, innovation, economic growth and financial inclusion by delivering instant, irrevocable payments, 24-7 availability and data-rich ISO 20022 messaging.
We have benefited from extensive engagement and learnings from other jurisdictions that have found that while new risks emerge, real-time transactions can be safe transactions.
No payment type is immune to fraud. That's why Canada will be the first to launch its national real-time payment system with mandatory fraud mitigation on day one.
These four requirements are, one, real-time fraud transaction scoring with network-level insights to inform fraud management and payment decisioning; two, a centralized intelligence platform that provides national reporting with aggregated fraud insights; three, a shared and centrally managed risk list to track and flag attributes of those involved in confirmed fraud; and, four, confirmation of payee capability, allowing individuals to verify the account identity of the recipient.
The RTR's use of the ISO 20022 messaging standard will unlock powerful new analytics, allowing participants to better track and disrupt complex fraud patterns. Further, the RTR is designed to facilitate compliance with anti-money laundering requirements for cross-border indicators.
Modernizing Canada's payment infrastructure is a nation-building exercise. Payments Canada is fully committed to supporting collaborative efforts to safeguard Canadians in this pivotal era for payments.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.