Canada

Visa Canada is collaborating with Finn AI to develop natural language chatbot technology to address common needs experienced by credit cardholders.

Royal Bank of Canada introduced a wave of technology initiatives in a bid to attract more tech-savvy customers who embrace a digital lifestyle.

Two major Canadian banks, Bank of Montreal and Simplii Financial, have become victims of hacks that affected some 50,000 and 40,000 customers respectively. Neither bank decided to pay the ransom by the hackers' May 28 deadline.

While unprecedented debt levels pose risks, lenders say there won’t be any major upset to the economy for a number of reasons, including the view Bank of Canada won’t press ahead with higher rates if signs of stress emerge.

Visa Canada plans to offer real-time B2B and B2C disbursements via its Visa Direct card-to-card transfer service, competing head-on with Canada's Interac network and a product Mastercard launched in the country earlier this year.

This month, Vancouver became the first Canadian city to commercially roll out open transit payments. But the city of Laval actually got a head start on Vancouver with a pilot project that is getting a positive reaction from riders.

Despite Canada's high penetration of contactless POS terminals and consumer affinity for the technology, the country has lagged behind nations such as the U.K. and Singapore in contactless payments. That is set to change as Canada's transit schemes launch contactless open-payment systems.

Instead of expanding Alipay’s geographic reach across the U.S. and Canada, Alipay is doubling down on merchant acceptance in urban areas and tourist zones to drive more spending volume.

The expansion of Visa Direct is designed to speed disbursements for health care patients who can receive an instant payment versus waiting several days to a week for payout.

Before Paytm became one of India's most popular mobile wallets, it was a little-known bill payment app that launched in 2011 and spread by word of mouth. Now Paytm is revisiting that history in Canada, though its challenges in North America are very different than what it faced in India.