Canada

This week marks the official start of Canada’s legalized recreational cannabis industry — and American Express, Visa and Mastercard are ready to handle the new market's payments, in a stark contrast to their stance in the U.S.

Banks are still in their experimental phase of using virtual and augmented reality to interact with customers, and the key to their success will be embracing the technology's social nature. And sometimes that means making an app designed for non-customers.

Despite the real-world use cases being found around blockchain and distributed ledger technology, banks are being warned to be cautious about committing to any such projects.

Comparing the U.K. payments landscape to that of the U.S. is sometimes like comparing apples to oranges according to Ankit Kumar, manager of digital payments and mobile financial services at Gemalto.

The push for faster payments in the U.S. has suffered from the lack of a government mandate, which in other countries resulted in a common, streamlined system. Now it's time for the disparate U.S. platforms to come together.

China’s Golden Week started on Monday and with it, global cities and merchants are boldly promoting Alipay in an effort to capture Chinese tourist dollars. At the same time, merchants are building out a competitive acceptance network that could someday rival the major payment card networks.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, has named David Scola, a former Barclays exec, its new head of North America operations.

Canada’s credit unions have been losing out to the country’s banks in terms of business banking market share, and have struggled to keep up with the banks’ capacity for technological innovation. Central 1 wants to redress this imbalance in the credit unions’ ability to compete with the banks.

A deceleration in mortgage balances ends CIBC's three-year streak of outpacing Canada's other large lenders on mortgage growth. Royal Bank of Canada said this week that mortgage balances were 5.9% higher than a year earlier.

Canadian banks will likely report profit gains of as much as 10% in the third quarter as four rate increases by the Bank of Canada make consumer and commercial loans more profitable.