Canada’s Real-Time Rail Quarterly Update with Jude Pinto: 2026 Q1

Jude Pinto, Chief Delivery Officer at Payments Canada, provides a quarterly update on Canada’s Real-Time Rail (RTR) sharing the program’s progress to date and future direction over the next three months.

Canada's Real-Time Rail (RTR) program made significant progress in 2025 and in 2026 we will continue to push forward on delivering real-time payments to businesses and consumers.

In 2025, we transitioned successfully into the comprehensive testing phase, began to onboard new potential members, published The Real-Time Rail Participation Guide for Payment Service Providers and advanced a critical component of the RTR payment system, the legal framework.

Our regulators, current and future members, stakeholders and delivery partners all played instrumental roles in 2025 to prepare Canada’s RTR for launch, and we are grateful for their collaboration. This team approach will continue into 2026 and beyond.

Specifically on the testing of the RTR, in Q4 of 2025, the program completed the system integration testing (SIT) phase in which all of the RTR’s individual components were brought together and tested as one system. This phase ensured that the system can operate according to our requirements and standards. We then entered the user acceptance testing (UAT) phase to validate the end-to-end business scenarios and operations. This phase, which continues into 2026, ensures that Canada’s RTR meets all business requirements and works as intended for system participants in real-world scenarios.

While 2025 was a year of successes, there is still much work to do in delivering real-time payments to Canadian businesses and consumers. In Q1 of 2026, we are focused on testing, onboarding and operational readiness.

In parallel to our ongoing UAT phase, we are entering performance, security and resilience testing phases, which are designed to push the limits of the entire RTR payment system in its target environments to ensure that Canada’s RTR can safely and effectively handle a high volume of transactions in real-time.

We are also now actively onboarding new payment service providers (PSPs) as Payments Canada members. Most recently, we welcomed Wise, Float, Paramount Commerce, KOHO and Brim Financial as new PSP members. This is a meaningful achievement for Payments Canada and our ecosystem. These PSP members are now eligible to apply to participate on the RTR. Their participation will drive industry competition and innovation, delivering better value and more advanced services to Canadian consumers and businesses, as each new member brings unique use cases to Canada’s RTR and to the country.

Another key focus for this quarter is preparing to operate Canada’s RTR once live. We are expanding our always-on environment to manage real-time payments with centralized fraud capabilities 24 hours a day, every day of the year. This collaborative work is underway with the support and expertise of our delivery partners, operating partners and our members.

In terms of how our work fits within the payments landscape, we can all feel the momentum around how we can contribute to Canada's global competitiveness to increase productivity, prosperity and economic growth, as was recently outlined in the federal budget. Payments matter to Canada, and the future of payments in Canada is very bright. What a year of accomplishments this will be for everyone involved in the RTR program as together with our members, regulators, delivery partners and stakeholders, we get closer and closer to delivering real-time payments to Canada.

Please contact us at info@payments.ca to learn more about membership and system participation.