Good afternoon, and thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
As the chair said, my name is Mark Hines. I lead fraud product at Interac. Thank you very much for the invitation to take part in today's study.
I'd like to begin by acknowledging that we're gathered on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin nation and by recognizing the enduring presence of first nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
Interac is a Canadian-owned payment and digital verification company. Nearly 300 financial institutions connect to our networks, and Canadians use our products more than 20 million times every day. We sit at the centre of how money moves in Canada, which gives us a unique system-wide view of fraud and of financial crime in particular. Our teams monitor the network around the clock, sharing signals with financial institutions so they can act on suspicious activity in real time.
I'd like to use my time today to explain what has changed about fraud, why it's harder to fight than it used to be and where the greatest opportunity lies for protecting Canadians.
Fraud and scams are serious and growing threats. Behind every scam is someone who has lost money and often their confidence with it. However, the nature of the threat has evolved. Historically, fraud defences were built around the sender because the main threat was unauthorized access to an account. Scams work differently because the genuine account holder is authorizing the payment. This moves the focus to the receiver side of the network and requires new capabilities and investment across the system. At the same time, AI has dramatically increased the velocity of scam attempts. It's not just that they're more sophisticated and convincing. They're now automated at scale and only need to catch someone off guard once to be successful.
The most important thing I want to get across to the committee is that this problem cuts across multiple industries and sectors. We at Interac are investing heavily, but taking the next step requires a coordinated approach.
Interac deploys anti-fraud and scam capabilities on e-transfer today, and we have invested heavily in being the first approved fraud provider on Canada's new real-time system. Unlike other jurisdictions, we will launch the RTR with fraud protections built in, with the goal of preventing the spike in scams that other countries have encountered. This means Canadians will have greater levels of protection from day one.
No single company or sector can solve this alone. Fraud does not start and end in the same place. It often begins with a phone call, a text or an online scam. By the time the money is moved, the institution completing that transaction often has the least visibility into how it began. The key metric is the time between detection and intervention. The faster a trusted signal reaches the right place, the more often an institution can act before the money is gone.
We see the government's work to develop a national anti-fraud strategy and establish a financial crimes agency as an important step. Enforcement matters, but enforcement acts after harm is done. It needs to be paired with the coordination that prevents harm in the first place—that prevents money from leaving Canadians' bank accounts.
That's why the single most effective step Canada can take is enabling better data sharing across sectors, including financial institutions, telecommunications providers, digital platforms and law enforcement. To be clear, it's not about pooling data in a single open utility. It's about targeted, risk-based signals that let institutions act on the right information at the right time. This is a prevention-first approach, which is where we believe the greatest opportunity lies for Canada.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.