How two Canadian banks are monetizing payments infrastructure

• Key insights: BMO and RBC have sold Moneris Solutions — their co-owned payment processing fintech that launched 25 years ago — to private equity firm Francisco Partners for CA$2 billion ($1.4 million), but retained a customer-referral arrangement. 
• What's at stake: The deal comes at a time when many banks are looking for ways to monetize their payment infrastructure. 
• Expert quote: "RBC and BMO are separating ownership of payments infrastructure from distribution. They're selling Moneris but retaining long-term referral relationships, which raises an interesting question about what technology banks actually need to own." —Abhijit Chakravarty, director - Americas, IBS Intelligence.

Canadian banks BMO and RBC have offloaded their co-owned payments processing company, Moneris Solutions, to a private equity firm in a deal that challenges conventional wisdom for how banks can monetize their payments infrastructure.

BMO and RBC, which incubated and have owned Moneris for the last 25 years, sold the payment processing fintech to San Francisco-based PE firm Francisco Partners for CA$2 billion ($1.4 million), split evenly between the two banks. BMO and RBC will also maintain "exclusive" customer referral relationships with Moneris.

"The deep relationships we have built with BMO and RBC extend well beyond ownership," Moneris President and CEO James Hicks said in a statement. "Their decision to establish long-term referral agreements and maintain ongoing commercial relationships with Moneris reflects the confidence both organizations have in Moneris and provides a strong foundation for continuity, collaboration and long-term growth."

Those referral agreements are what makes the deal unique, according to Abhijit Chakravarty, Director, Americas at IBS Intelligence.

"RBC and BMO are separating ownership of payments infrastructure from distribution," Chakravarty told American Banker. "They're selling Moneris but retaining long-term referral relationships, which raises an interesting question about what technology banks actually need to own."

Moneris is the largest payment processor in Canada, processing about 3.5 billion transactions per year, according to the company.

Read more:

• These are the Top Performing Banks of 2026 in four asset tiers
• New York bank regulator says vendor flaw hit its firms
• The best credit unions to work for in 2026
• Tokenized deposits are here. Banks need to manage the risks.

For BMO, the sale is one of three divestitures the bank has completed in the last 12 months of business units that did not meet its growth and return on equity expectations, Chief Financial Officer Rahul Nalgirkar said on the company's Aug. 25 earnings call. BMO sold 138 bank branches in the U.S. to First Citizens last October, and its transportation and vendor finance portfolio in May.

"We've been very rigorous about where we are allocating this capital and resources to client relationships, which will be at our higher growth, higher return expectations," Nalgirkar said.

The cash injection from the sale will allow BMO and RBC to invest in other areas of development, IBS' Chakravarty said.

"Banks today want to optimize their cash in a better way. It's not core to their business to incubate and keep investing in a payments company," Chakravarty said. "BMO and RBS saw that they have other priorities to invest in because now, in today's AI age, there is heavy investment that needs to be done from a software development and AI standpoint."

The transaction also provides balance sheet value to the two banks, he said. BMO expects the sale to improve the bank's common equity Tier 1 ratio by approximately 15 bps, and RBC said it expected a "marginally positive impact" on its CET1 ratio.

Francisco Partners, for its part, gains a distribution network 25 years in the making.

"Francisco Partners is acquiring something extraordinarily difficult for a Fintech to build from scratch: national-scale merchant distribution and billions of transactions," said Chakravarty. "Their opportunity is to increase the value generated from that installed base through software, data and newer commerce capabilities."

The deal comes at a time when banks are looking for ways to monetize their payments infrastructure following modernization investments, Michael Levens, vice president and financial services payments lead at Capgemini, told American Banker.

"Especially with the ISO 20022 transformation of many banks' payments infrastructure, a lot of banks are starting to look at, How do I monetize or how do I get the right term or investment from my millions and billions of dollars I've been spending on my payments infrastructure?"

Those efforts can include data monetization, commercialization of the infrastructure, or creating an external entity. Fifth Third, for example, became the bank behind fintechs this year largely thanks to Newline — its embedded banking and payments business and one of American Banker's Innovation of the Year 2026 honorees. Newline was the fastest-growing segment of the Cincinnati-based bank's commercial payments division in 2025 with fee revenue jumping 53% year over year.

BMO and RBC are not the only banks that have found unique ways to offload their payments business without fully getting out of the industry. Barclays last year struck a deal with alternative asset manager Brookfield Asset Management to eventually spin off the bank's payments acceptance business into a standalone entity. Barclays would invest about 400 million pounds ($534.5 million) into the business for the first three years following the deal, and Brookfield would run the company and eventually have the option to acquire up to 80% of the company.