Finance committee  Thank you. You should have on your iPad a slide deck that I would like to walk you through, if possible. If you can search for that on the iPad, I would really appreciate it. CFIB is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization representing more than 109,000 small and medium-si

Finance committee  Reducing complexity is the most important thing, through standardization perhaps. Whether FinPay is the right avenue I don't know. That would be probably the only point of difference between us and the RCC, but at the same time, it's probably the only forum right now that exists

Finance committee  Yes, it's the idea that defaults can probably easily be put into the file name. As some around this table have said, they're still trying to figure out their BlackBerrys. If you can download an app that automatically puts the highest price card at the top and you as a consumer ar

Finance committee  There is no doubt that credit cards, debit cards, electronic payments have improved the lot for many retailers. There is no doubt. That has made it a lot more convenient for them. They are more guaranteed to get paid. There are all kinds of advantages. You can see even in the d

Finance committee  Absolutely, it ultimately is going to be. They just feel they have no power in that relationship as it is. They feel they have to offer it, so they have to pay the fees; they can't negotiate, and it's a kind of situation where they are the takers. They have no other ability to do

Finance committee  That's a good question. I'm sure they exist. If you're an online business only, for example—

Finance committee  We do have a few of those.

Finance committee  Remember that particular chart refers to all sectors of the economy, so that includes manufacturing and all those others that do business-to-business transactions. For them, cheques become an important tool for record-keeping purposes. It's also far easier to have a chequebook th

Finance committee  We did ask that question in a recent survey regarding the various payment systems, credit card, debit card, cheque, as well as cash, though not so much. We asked what percentage of the transactions had been returned to them, and it was lower for cheques than it was for, say, cred

Finance committee  No. That would definitely be one of the bigger barriers, and they fear it very much, because they know there are lots of security rules and privacy rules, and that they are going to be liable if it's not done correctly. I would say it's a big area.

Finance committee  That's an excellent question. Not only is the business-to-business part slow in developing, but so are the business-to-government and government-to-business parts. Perhaps government can play a role in building a system within payments to government that can help spearhead or dri

Finance committee  The typical one right now is that you pay your bills online, right? You can pay your electricity bill and all of that online. A lot of small businesses would love to have that as an option so that they can pay each other, but to set up a system like that is very expensive for a s

Finance committee  Yes. We recently did some work around the payments system. We have a whole report around Canadian payments and small businesses. One of the questions we asked was what the biggest obstacles were for merchants in accepting or receiving electronic payments. Number one was cost. I

Finance committee  Yes, certainly I think there is a lot of fear, given what we saw with premium cards initially in 2008. Now that we have another player entering the mix, a telecommunications company, we know that's how they are making their piece of the pie. Right now, our understanding is that's

Finance committee  Yes, and history has shown us that.... We've seen this play before, and I think the trust is not there that this will not happen in the future, so we want to make sure the protections are in place.