Canada

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.

Air Canada and its banking partners sweetened their bid for Aeroplan, winning over Aimia’s board and an activist shareholder that was seeking a higher price.

Brim Financial is the only non-bank or credit union to have an issuer licence from Mastercard Canada. Unlike other countries, Canada doesn't require credit card issuers to have bank licenses or bank sponsors.

The U.S. companies agreed to reduce the average annual interchange rate in Canada by 10 basis points to 1.4 percent on cardThe new rate takes effect in 2020 and runs for five years. The government estimated that small and medium-sized businesses could save C$25,000 over the period.

Interac and Bambora see an opportunity to pull back Canadian domestic e-commerce transactions from credit cards to Interac debit and make it possible for Canadians to shop online in the U.S. with Interac cards.

The recent tariff escalations could cause financial pain for specific shopping corridors, particularly in price-conscious locales.