Episode 40: Participant onboarding — Unlocking access for RTR participants

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Transcript of the recording

Elizabeth (Liz) Dempsey:
Welcome to The SUMMIT Summer series, a special presentation by the PayPod. The podcast from Payments Canada that explores the trends and topics influencing payments in Canada and around the world. I'm your host, Liz Dempsey. This summer on The PayPod, we're bringing you some of the most popular and best reviewed sessions, from the deep dives and breakout stages at The 2026 SUMMIT. 

Over the next eight weeks, we'll be releasing one new episode a week, giving you front row access to the expert-led conversations on topics ranging from real-time payments to fraud to open banking and tokenization. We're calling it The SUMMIT Summer series. Today, we're kicking off the series with one of the most well attended sessions at The SUMMIT. The session, entitled "Participant onboarding: Unlocking access for RTR participants," discusses how to prepare for the Real-Time Rail. 

As you'll hear, connecting to the RTR is a series of strategic decisions involving operating models, risk customer experience, liquidity management and partnerships. Join moderator Michele Poole, founder of Deep Poole Advisory, as she guides the expert panel featuring Lorna Godin from CIBC, Kristi Lewis from Paramount Commerce and Aaron Walker from Payments Canada. Together, they take you through the RTR onboarding journey, sharing insights on how making the right operational decisions early on ensures the RTR becomes a powerful foundation for customer value, scalability and business growth. Let's dive right into today's featured panel. Here's Michele to kick things off. 

Michele Poole:
My name is Michele Poole. I'm the founder of Deep Pool Advisory, and I help PSPs and fintechs navigate the payment ecosystem in Canada. As we all know, it's a little bit complex. So I help them with that complexity and understand how to get rail access, how to build the right partnerships and how to understand what those decisions they need to make are and how that can help them in the future, especially turning rail access into an actual lever for growth and for scalability in the market. 

So there's been a lot of discussions today around all of the technical aspects of the RTR. And as we all know, obviously that's very important. But connecting to the RTR is not just a technology choice. It's also a lot of other choices. As Janet talked about in her session, it's an operating model choice. It's a risk choice. It's a customer experience choice. It's a liquidity and settlement choice. It's a partnership choice. And for many organizations, those choices don't just shape how they'll connect to the RTR, but then what they can actually do with that connection once they're live with that. 

So in this session, we're going to talk about and get some insights on some of the key considerations that you need to think about. And so to do that, we have Aaron Walker from Payments Canada. And we also have Lorna Godin from CIBC. And we have Kristi Lewis from Paramount Commerce. And so what's interesting here is that both Paramount Commerce and CIBC, both organizations who will be planning to connect to the RTR. But the interesting part is that they come to it not necessarily from the same customer base, the same use cases or the same considerations that would have been made inside their business for operating models and so forth. So we'd like to get a bit of insights and kind of understand a little bit more about that. 

So to start, I'm going to start with you, Lorna, and I'd like you to briefly tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in CIBC’s journey towards becoming connected to the RTR. And then when your organization looked at onboarding to the RTR, what was the business rationale for connecting and how did that shape any internal business or operational decisions internally? 

Lorna Godin: 
Okay. Hi everyone. Um, everybody's. Lorna Godin. Um, I have been kind of one of the OG, uh, forces in the RTR, um, from its inception as an idea to kind of walking through rules policy and into delivery now. So I get to continue to lead the team at CIBC that is delivering this into market for CIBC. So it's very exciting. I can't wait. We're really getting to the, to the nuts and bolts of it. 

As one of those OG members, where our decisions came from were probably a little different than somebody who's contemplating participation now. Right., so, we made some decisions around how to connect. Those decisions were very much based at the time in ambiguity. We weren't quite sure where this was going to go, how it was going to work. The client experience, how is the client experience going to differentiate in a real-time space? We have a very, very broad base of clients. So you're looking at from corporates right down to the consumer. How are those? How are those changes going to affect them? Do they want real-time payments? Um what's the difference between using the non-real, the near Real-Time Rail and the Real-Time Rail and our clients actually going to experience that. 

So those were some of the things that went in behind our decisions early on. Those decisions certainly evolved. And I'll talk more about it kind of as we, as we continue through the panel conversation, but as, the market around us evolved as regulation evolved, our decisions have continued to evolve. But there was conversation in the earlier panel about operational models, larger operational teams. Where do your operational teams live? How are you going to facilitate all of this in the back end? And, of course, you have to as a large institution, you have to reuse a lot of what you've got while you're modernizing some of your legacy so that your decisions around engaging partners early on and how, what you're going to tackle first, because there's there was a lot to do. 

We had to really go back to what, what are the core things that need to be there? Like what are the things we can do now even though we don't know necessarily what the client experience is going to look like at this juncture? We're moving a lot more data. We have to facilitate things faster. We have to move to a twenty-four-seven model. So there were a lot of decisions that were made based on those things early on. And I'll talk more about it as we continue through.

Michele Poole: 
Awesome. And Kristi.

Kristi Lewis:
Hello everybody. So I'm Kristi, I'm the VP of Marketing and industry relations at Paramount Commerce. So, my role as it relates to the RTR is really to determine why we should participate, how we participate and then facilitating those relationships in order to, you know, actually participate in the RTR. And let me give you a little bit of context on who Paramount Commerce is. It'll help you understand our decision tree as we go through our RTR participation. So Paramount Commerce is Canada's leading pay-by-bank provider. So we specialize in bank account based payments. Think Interac e-Transfer, soon to be our RTR of course. So we process about ten billion across different industries. So remittance, gaming, bill payment and e-commerce. 

So hopefully what you heard from that was pay-by-bank. So when you look at the RTR, the decision on should we participate was really an easy one. There's major benefits that our clients are going to see right away when we participate. So think data rich payments for our remittance clients, instant irrevocable payments for our gaming operators. And I think pretty much every one of our business clients is looking for faster settlement. 

What was a little bit more of a tricky conversation? There was some very good debates back and forth around how are we going to participate in the RTR? So are we going to go direct to exchange, or are we going to go through a connection service provider and we can get into some of those different decision factors a little bit later. But at the end of the day, it really came down to autonomy. 

In this wonderful Canadian landscape for the very first time. PSPs have the ability to connect directly to a rail without going through a third party. First time ever. That's absolutely massive because for us, that means we can build what we want, when we want, how we want, without having to rely on certain capabilities being available through a connection service provider first. 

So that was, you know, kind of that major decision that kind of swayed us towards the direct to exchange participation model. 

Michele Poole: 
Thank you so much. And Aaron, tell us a little bit about you and your role at Payments Canada. And then from your view, because your view is across all of the participants that are onboarding to the RTR. And so it would be great to have an understanding from you. Where do you see organizations sometimes underestimating the business and operational decisions involved with that? 

Aaron Walker:
Hi, everybody. So I lead the participant services team. So my team's job is to really guide all the applicants through two parallel processes. One is sort of you could think of it as administrative, it's your participant application, all the due diligence around understanding your business and the kind of risk around the activities that you're planning to bring to the RTR, guiding you through certification. That whole application process. 

The second part is the, the more technical part of getting you hooked up to the system connected to the test system through certification and then ultimately connected up into production. 

And from this vantage point, like having worked with all of the, all of the participants, Both are OG members and our and our brand new members. There's a lot of decisions that you guys are going to delve into. I think I would zoom out and say one of the biggest things that people underestimate is the amount of work that it takes to truly understand your obligations as a participant. 

So this is huge. Like, as Lorna has been along from the very beginning of the journey. You guys have been in years of conversations about the rules, right? 

Lorna Godin:
And which ones have changed.

Aaron Walker:
And not just not just you. Right. Your, your lawyers, your operations teams, your compliance and risks teams. They've all been along the journey, understanding the rules and the bylaw. All those key documents, the bylaw, the rules, the supporting documents, like the service level description, the fraud service manual, the emergency description document. All of these together form the legal framework that provide that sort of legal certainty that underpins the promise of the RTR. 

It doesn't get a lot of airtime, but to me, it's foundational to the future of the RTR. And the thing is, it's an enormous package of work. And as a participant, it's an enormous binding contract. So you're signing up for this as a participant, and there's no shortcut to understanding what those obligations are, right? It it boils down to line-by-line. Reading each one of those documents. There's 15 rules. There's a service level description, there's a fraud service. There's a lot. So your lawyer needs to read it. Your product team needs to read it. Your risk team needs to read it, your payment operations need to read it. Because if you don't, it's like signing up for a part in a play and not reading the script. So when the curtain goes up, it's not going to be pretty, right? It's super important.

Michele Poole:
Even just to kind of build a little bit on that, it's almost like, you know, as a PSP, you have to be registered with our RPAA, right? And there's all of those requirements and there's actually 148 of them. And then you get your registration. But that's actually just the beginning, right? So, you know, really when we think about RTR onboarding, right. It's not really beginning with how do we connect? It's more about, you know, what is it we're trying to enable? So just to kind of build on that RTR onboarding is not just one single decision. It's a series of connected decisions and choices. So, you know, in our industry, just to add to the good old list of acronyms, which we use a lot of, right? There's ISP, DSP and CSP. But essentially that's all about how is it that you're going to participate? Are you going to settle as a direct clearer or with a settlement agent? And then it comes to how are you going to connect? Are you going to connect directly to the exchange and introduce your own payment messages? Or will you connect through a connection service provider? 

So Lorna and Kristi, as each of your organizations moved from interest to onboarding for the RTR, were there any big aha or surprise moments in deciding how to participate and how to connect? And were there any, you know, key considerations or key things you'd want to highlight for any others here in the audience that are thinking about wanting to onboard to the RTR that you would be willing to share? 

Kristi Lewis:
Yeah, absolutely. I wish I could say there was a shortage of aha moments, but there's many that come true every day. So Paramount Commerce was among the first cohort of PSPs to become very proud members of Payments Canada. And if any of you have ever been first at something like normally it's very painful. There's normally tons of bumps along the road. There's opaque decision making, there's lots of back and forth. And one thing that was a very surprising aha moment was there was a very clear path for PSPs to become members of Payments Canada, as well as what it looks like to then connect to the exchange. 

And so like a huge kudos to the Payments Canada team, because the amount of work that must have gone behind that process to make it as smooth as it was for us as one of the first PSPs to go through it like, well done. It was incredible. And so that definitely also played a part in determining how we were going to connect. So having the availability of the fantastic Payments Canada team, onboarding and supporting our technical teams as they go through that process definitely played into that decision making. I'm not going to say it was easy. I don't want to underplay the amount of work, but there is a clear and defined process.

For my PSPs in the room. A couple of other things that you want to consider. So in the pluses for direct connection, we talked a lot about autonomy. So owning that user experience, owning the limits, owning the branding. That was major things that played into our decision making. But on the flip side, there's also the cost of that. And so there is an upfront build cost. There is a very complex build up that has to be taken into consideration if you're thinking about going direct. The other thing that I would, you know, recommend that you do is look internally and see what are the capabilities and skill sets of our team. 

So at Paramount, we're quite fortunate. We have a very fantastic dev team and they have experience working on other real-time gross settlement systems like Sepa and FedNow. And so that also contributed into our decision making. That said, you know, we can do this. We can go direct. And I'm not sure that that's necessarily, you know, kind of an easy check mark across the board. So definitely something you'll want to consider because if you need to outsource that skill set, that's another cost that needs to be factored in. Whether or not you want to go direct to exchange, or whether or not you want to go through a connection service provider. 

Lorna Godin:
So different for us. Absolutely. Aas a large bank. A lot of the decisions are sort of made for us. We're direct players in the system already. So we're obviously going to direct clear on the RTR. But I would say, um, the aha moment was the pace at which it evolved. As I said, we made some decisions early on, we sort of had to resynthesize internally and are they the right decisions to make? I think they're the right decisions to make. Yes. Let's carry on. So we do have this lovely product in market called Interac e-Transfer. And many of our clients subscribe to them. So we had to be careful of changing that client experience and how that might be affected by the Real-Time Rail and some of the new participants that come in and offer different products and how we compete using what we call kind of a legacy product, right?

So when we were talking with Interac the other portion of aha was the level of navigating, I guess the navigating and the harmonization of the current in-market product. So we all knew that we had, we had to convert. We have financial market infrastructure compliance to meet, we have to convert to real-time settlement. But what does that look like to the existing in-market product? What does that look like to our internal operations or internal technical systems? And how do we ensure that we are complying with Payments Canada rules and our obligations around Payments Canada rules and also ensure that our partner, Interac, as a CSP is also complying because we are ultimately responsible for complying to the rules.

So there was a lot of aha in that evolution of the PSPs coming on, our PSPs coming out, the Bank of Canada sending out, you know, the call for applications at the time that we started these conversations and were making the decisions around what we were going to offer to our clients. We really didn't have a good lens on how quickly that was going to come or not.

So we weren't sure what we were competing with. I talked about ambiguity. There was just a lot of ambiguity. As most in the room know this, the program has been going on for quite some time, but a lot of stuff has become more clear. So we've been able to kind of evolve and adapt as more, more clarity has happened. And, as these things have been put out into market and we've seen kind of how they play out. So, I think I answered all the questions, I think so, okay.

Kristi Lewis:
Yeah, I'm going to throw out a thank you to the big banks as well. So as a PSP coming into this process a little bit later, there has been so much legwork that has been done by the banks that we now very fortunately get to benefit from. So some of those, you know, conversations that have changed paths. So thank you so much for the work that you've put into this. And, you know, we're very excited to come in after some of those decisions have been made for sure.

Lorna Godin:
And it'll continue to evolve, right, with the voices of the PSPs. And we'll just figure it out as we go along. 

Michele Poole:
Awesome. Okay. So Aaron, from your view across all of the organizations that are onboarding to the RTR, have there been any aha moments or something that they realize only as they're starting to on board, that you could share and, you know, impart some best practices for others. 

Aaron Walker:
One of the aha moments that I've seen repeated again and again is this aha that, oh, payments is a team sport, right? It takes your technology and network team, your security and cyber team, your fraud and risk team, your product team, your payment operations and exception handling, your treasury and cash management, your user experience team. And that's just to fill out the application form. It's a lot.

There's another layer to the teamwork part. And that's, I often see this aha moment when applicants realize that, oh, to meet my obligations as a participant, I need to cooperate with other participants. So whether it comes to requests for returns or sanction screening requests for information or managing your liquidity outside of links operating hours. These are all things that are going to require you to develop relationships with the other participants in an operational way and possibly in 24/7 operational way. So something to think about. It's an aha moment that I've seen recur again and again.

Michele Poole:
That's a good one I think for sure. Okay. So let's move from onboarding to operational reality. Dun dun dun dun. So once an organization on-boards to a real-time irrevocable payment rail, the work then isn't actually about whether or not the payments can move. It's all about is the organization ready to support the outcome? Things like controls, reporting, fraud response, liquidity management, they all become your operational realities. So, Aaron, I'm going to start with you from a Payments Canada perspective, when participants are onboarding to the rear, what do they need to look at beyond technical connection and think about in terms of what it's really going to be like to operate twenty four by seven, three hundred sixty five on the RTR.

Aaron Walker:
Yeah, it's one of the first things I always say to a new applicant is, if you think of the RTR as a technology project, you're setting yourself up for failure. It's so much more than that. It's all that stuff that you just talked about, right? And it circles back to my initial point about, you know, understanding your obligations as a participant. If you read the rules line by line, it's going to become very clear all those different parts of your operations that are going to be required to work in harmony.

I think earlier this morning, we heard a lot of talk about the tech stack. I think equal energy needs to go around your operational stack. What are all those capabilities that you need in order to be able to support the business and the operations of the RTR? And the thing about the operational stack is it comes with that added complexity of people. There's people, change management aspect to the operational stack. Everyone needs to understand their accountability and their role. The risk guardrails that exist around their activities and how to respond when things don't go according to the standard operating procedure, because that's going to happen, right? It speaks to that business continuity and operational resiliency part.

The other thing it shares in common with the technology stack is this idea of composability. So you don't have to do everything yourself. That operational stack, it makes sense to focus on your core strengths. Do those things that you're really good at and maybe partner on the others.

Michele Poole:
Excellent. Good insights for sure. So, Kristi, I want to start with you.

Kristi Lewis:
Yes. I feel like Aaron tee’d that up very well for me actually. So thank you very much. Um, I completely agree. And actually I feel like I've been guilty of this so far in my answers in talking about, you know, the technology piece and the build complexity. Joining a new rail, you think about, you know, the user experience and the sexy front end. But that's not all of the work.

There's about an equal portion of work that has to happen on the policy and procedure side for things to actually run smoothly. And so on our side, we're going through this really super fun exercise, uh, going through all of our policies and procedures and figuring out which ones that exist that can be modified for the RTR, which ones like where do we have any gaps? Do we need any new policies and procedures? And then, you know, there's a couple where you're like, oh, can we still have this policy or procedure?

And maybe let me give you an example of each one. So for the modified piece, we have a very strong fraud system and risk management system. So we work very closely with Interac e-Transfer, near real time. We have 20 years of data that goes into our AI and predictive modelling. And especially when you consider the different industries that we support across remittance and gaming, we're very strong in this area. And so being able to adopt these policies slightly to account for the RTR, has been, you know, I don't say easy, but a little more straightforward.

Then you look at the treasury and the cash management piece and we've been talking about liquidity. Well, this is a brand new area of the business for us. And so we're working with our banking partners in new ways to have a funding partner and things that we've never done before. So there's entirely new processes and procedures that need to be put in place around this. And, you know, then maybe just kind of on the people side. So at Paramount Commerce, we have a very flexible work culture. You know, my little shameless plug, I work for Paramount. So we can work anywhere for up to three months of the year, but of course, safety and soundness for the RTR are very important and critical, the most basic piece of the infrastructure. You cannot connect to the RTR from a public IP address. So no hotels, no airports. So what does this look like for some of our, you know, flexible work culture pieces moving forward? And how do we adapt and make sure that we have coverage of our team to be able to support our team and the RTR?

Michele Poole:
Thanks. I think that gives us a real kind of overview of all of the net-new processes and things and operational realities that you guys would need to think through that could apply for other new PSPs too. But let's switch gears a bit because Lorena, you guys are obviously a very mature organization with mature operating processes in place. So for you, were there any anything net-new? Was there anything you guys had to think about from an operational reality perspective?

Lorna Godin:
First of all, I love that such a unique thing to have to contemplate. I was like, wow, that sounds really fun. Different things. Yes. To contemplate. There were some comments earlier from, from KOHO and talking about, hey, we don't have these massive operational engines behind us to do all these things. And I'm like, oh, well, that's a bit of a double edged sword, right? Because we do. And, they're all very segregated by, by function, right? Generally, we're sort of, we're doing widgets and we're, we're segregating by function for efficiency. And suddenly you're trying to figure out, okay, this function over here does, does this with treasury and this function over here does this as far as exception handling and this function over here does this relative to fraud. And you can't like having handoffs between all those functions, like how do you make that happen and how can you automate? And we've got, you know, gen AI in front of us and productivity targets to meet now. And so all of those things are really coming to a head as we look to onboarding, right?

So we've, we've had this whole journey behind us, but now we're like, okay, this is, this is the real nuts and bolts. We have to figure out how to make all this gel? Is there a spot or are there multiple spots? And can we create efficiency there? So those are some challenges that have been in front of us. And then you amplify that with like people change management, you have to deal with the humans too, right? The humans are going to get calls. The humans are going to have change. So there is a lot of work there.

I think you had sort of talked about where, where would I recommend people focus? I would actually recommend that people focus, whether it be PSP, large bank in those exceptional scenarios. I think we don't necessarily think about what's going to happen when things go bump in the night, but things will go bump in the night. So transactions will fall. Something, something will happen. Fraud will happen. And really think about how you are going to manage those transactions. Because once we start moving and we have large volumes that are moving in a new kind of era, and we're starting to layer on new experiences and new things that are continuing to come at us, it will be really important to have those. What I mean, we've referred to them as long time. You can probably as moments of truth, right? So our clients trust us when something's gone wrong and we can fix it. So it's really, really important to focus to zero in on some of those exception handling moments.

Michele Poole:
Awesome. I do have one more question I want to ask you guys. So I want this last question to really bring it back to all of the organizations in the room. We've touched on participation choices. We've touched a little bit about rationale on boarding readiness and some operational realities. But the bigger opportunity here is not just about connecting to the RTR. It's really about what that connection can either enable for your organization's growth, for your scalability, for your partners, for your customers, potentially even your business model over time. So Aaron, from your Payments Canada onboarding perspective, what should organizations be thinking through earlier if they want to be able to unlock the full potential of the RTR over time?

Aaron Walker:
Thanks, Michele. I think when I think about unlocking the potential of the RTR, I think about how there's this enormous ecosystem right in this room. And in order to unlock that potential. Every organization in that ecosystem needs to be operating from a position of strength.We made a lot of very deliberate kind of architectural decisions around the RTR to make many different modes of participation possible. And whether that's like direct or indirect settlement participant or being like a member non-participant and partnering with a bank or partnering with an aggregator like one of the credit union centrals, like there's a lot of different modes for you to like, speak to your core strengths and partner where you need to in order to get your smart idea that's bringing payment volume to the RTR into the market.

Michele Poole:
Makes a lot of sense. So Kristi and then Lorena from the perspective of onboarding. Tell me, how are you seeing the definition of access evolve over time? And as we look to the RTR going live, what is one kind of must have or one thing that potential participants really need to think about in their readiness plans so that they too, can ultimately unlock the full potential of the RTR over time. 

Kristi Lewis:
Yeah, that's a great question. I think, at least from a PSP perspective, when we look at, you know, the definition of access up until now, it's really been black and white. So we had the ability to connect to a rail through a big bank. That was it. Or I guess through a small bank, through a big bank to the rail. And those were the options. And so now for the first time, I like to say, I'm like, oh, we got options. There's multiple ways we can connect. There's multiple ways you can settle. And I think that kind of choose-your-own adventure for PSPs or fintechs or businesses is really going to change the landscape of innovation because they can figure out what works best for them and their business. And I think we're going to see a ton of very innovative new products and solutions for businesses and for individuals come out of this new definition of access.

I think we're going to see some really, really interesting stuff in the next couple of years in terms of innovation on the back of these decisions. So yeah, very, very excited about that.

If there's one thing I think that really needs to be thought through is having a very clear liquidity management strategy. The Real-Time Rail is pre-funded. Those transactions are going twenty four over seven, three hundred sixty five, whether we like it or not. And if there's no money in that account, those transactions are going to fail. So we need to make sure that there's real-time monitoring, that we understand how much money is in that account and how do we get money into that account if we need it ASAP, to make sure that the entire structure does not crumble because there's no money in that account. So I think if you are a PSP looking at the rReal-Time Rail, the liquidity management, the funding, the links partners, working with your banking partners to be able to have that system built in the background to support the RTR is going to be absolutely critical. And some might even say Paramount.

Lorna Godin:
As far as access is concerned, for me, I take kind of a different take a different bent on access, not so much access to the rail, but access to data. Okay. So the fact that we will have so much more data traveling, um, with payments and can understand it and adjust it and do things with it to protect offer, um, just and create internally. Right. So that, that for me is, is the big access piece. Uh, fully appreciating that we have opened up access to a rail and we have new players and, and there's more knowledge that comes with new players because you just people think of things in different ways. And so we're all going to learn from that. So I love it. As far as things to focus on, customer first. If you start with the customer and end with the customer and think of all of the things in between the experiences, the risk factors, the internal operations. If you don't, if you lose sight of what's happening to the customer at any point, then you’ve not been able to implement effectively because that's, that's really who it's for, right? It's to bring new experiences to them, to protect them. Like we've taken steps to protect customers through the RTR. So just don't lose focus on that customer and all of the things that this opens up for them.

Michele Poole:
Good answer. So I have a really interesting question that I'm not sure if, Aaron, you want to take it or, you know, Kristi, maybe it's interesting. Also from your perspective, the question is, how many steps are there in the onboarding process? And realistically, how long does it take? 

Aaron Walker:
There are many steps. I'll say the application process itself is kind of two stages. So I think it's important for people to understand that, that you fill in the application form, you know, assuming that you're a member, that's the first step. First, you have to become a Payments Canada member. Once you submit your RTR participant application, it goes through two phases. So there's an initial assessment. And that initial assessment leads up to a conditional approval.

And the reason we do this conditional approval is so that we can allow two things to happen in parallel. We want the conditional approval to satisfy us that the risk of you kind of leveraging our onboarding resources and connecting up to our test system is a reasonable risk for us to take.

After the conditional approval. Then the two things that happen in parallel is your connection to the test system, your onboarding to the test system and your certification activities and the due diligence of your full participant application. So that leads up to the final step of your participant application, which is approval of it and your PAT and go live on the system. In terms of the timeline, I haven't seen anyone who's, uh, schedule is replicated. It's unique to the fingerprint of each organization, right? It depends on how you're resourced and to what extent the RTR is a priority for you and your core capabilities as an organization. As a general rule of thumb, getting to that conditional approval step takes a couple of months. I haven't seen it go faster than a couple of months.

While that's happening, there's lots of preplanning that we can do together. So, that couple of months of pre-planning really sets the stage for the technical onboarding to the test system. That's like a three to four month kind of activity. So then that leads up to certification, which takes another month. So you're looking at six or seven months of planning, due diligence, onboarding to the test system and testing to get to live. That's the fastest that I could imagine it going. And of course, the limiting factor is the kind of resources and prioritization of the participant.

Michele Poole:
The next question kind of builds on what you've just said there, which is, you know, that it's not necessarily exactly the same for every organization. As they go through that, there are various steps. But the second question here, talks about, you know, is there, types of organizations that are best suited to be using a CSP to connect or, you know, connecting directly as a direct participant? And it's kind of the similar type of a situation. It really depends, as we talked about and as Kristi talked about, you know, one of the most important things is understanding your liquidity and understanding what that means for you and having a good handle on that. So that's one aspect of it. But then Kristi also talked about one of their decision factors for wanting to connect direct was so that they then had the autonomy to be able to innovate and build on top of that. So it's, again, kind of not a one like simple answer. There's a series of questions and choices that you need to go through that are related to your business and the future of where you want to go and what that could enable that. Then kind of almost like a rubric that or a, you know, a framework that kind of then leads you to, okay, you know what? Partnering from a liquidity perspective here or connecting in this way is what makes the most sense.

So it's not, and it's interesting because onboarding is similar in that way as well. So I'd say that's all the time we have for additional questions. But I thank you very much. And I'd say that, you know, if there's just three things we want you to think about and to take away from our discussion today, the first one would just be that RTR onboarding is not just one decision. So we've talked about the series of choices and considerations that you need to think about. Number two, getting connected is not the same as being ready. You might have the technical capabilities to get connected, but operationally you might not yet be ready for that. And the third thing is around the bigger opportunity. It's not just the connection itself, it's the bigger picture around what that connection can enable for your business over time. So I'd say thank you very much.

Elizabeth (Liz) Dempsey:
And that concludes our first episode of The SUMMIT Summer series. A huge thank you to our incredible panel: Aaron Walker, Lorna Gordon and Kristy Lewis and our moderator, Michele Poole. As we heard today, getting connected is a team sport and only the first step in unlocking the full potential of real-time payments for your business and for your customers.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to The PayPod wherever you get your podcasts. And you won't want to miss next week's episode, where we'll be sharing another great conversation from The 2026 SUMMIT.

I'm your host, Liz Dempsey. Thanks for listening and make sure to tune in next week.