Episode 32: The RTR, a team Canada approach to delivery and beyond

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Transcript of the recording

Elizabeth (Liz) Dempsey:
Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of The PayPod. I'm Liz Dempsey, Lead of Event Communications and Content at Payments Canada, and I'll be introducing today's topic, the Real-Time Rail (RTR), a team Canada approach to delivery and beyond. At The 2024 Payments Canada SUMMIT, our Chief Delivery Officer and interim Co-CEO Jude Pinto was joined on the main stage by our RTR strategic delivery partners. Their discussion focused on the renewed momentum around the RTR program, how we’ll collectively work together to deliver the real-time settlement of payments and what that means for the future of payments for Canada. I hope you enjoy this session, featuring Jude, Rob Mayer of CGI, Jeff Henderson of Interac and Mike Cook of IBM, as much as our audience at The SUMMIT did!

Jude Pinto:
Hello everyone and welcome to our next main stage discussion, “The RTR and a team Canada approach to delivery and beyond”. My name is Jude Pinto and I'm your moderator for today. Whether you're here in the room or tuning in on demand, welcome. Bienvenue. As I'm sure you're aware, not long before The SUMMIT, Payments Canada released a statement around the RTR. After an extensive replanning and risk mitigation period, we are very excited and invigorated to get back to work delivering this important system for Canada. Garry Foster, Payments Canada's Board Chair just spoke to us on the collaborative effort to deliver, as a team, a real-time payment system that Canada needs. And now we'll share a look into the nuts and bolts of delivery of the RTR. I'm going to go through some quick intros from each of you, Mike, Rob, and then Jeff. And can you tell us which part of the RTR delivery coalition that we're starting to call team Canada, you're a part of, Mike?

Mike Cook:
Thanks Jude, and thanks for the experience of the last few months to all of us on this stage. It's been a once in a lifetime opportunity. Mike Cook, Global Payments Leader, that's the big fancy talk around the world title, but the real work gets done with Interac and Payments Canada where I lead our work there. On the RTR, we're going to be the overall systems integrator. We're going to build the C and S, the clearing and settlement engine. We're going to work with Matt Charette's team to define the security controls and the architecture to make that secure. And we'll run all of the testing and the testing plan for the program and we'll work, frankly, with all of us here to put in the operations structure that's needed for something that's going to run 7/24/365.

Jude Pinto:
Great, Rob.

Rob Mayer:
Before I get started, I want to congratulate you Jude, Kristina, and all of Payments Canada for putting on an amazing conference. I think I can speak for all of the CGI and all the client partners that I spoke with, it's been an incredible conference. My name's Rob Mayer at CGI. I'm responsible for Canadian financial market infrastructure. In that role, I manage the Interac account and Payments Canada. In the RTR program, our responsibility is to work with our partners collaboratively and develop and design the infrastructure and build it. We're hosting it in our data centres at CGI and we'll be operating the environment through the test phases and into production.

Jude Pinto:
Great, thank you. And Jeff.

Jeff Henderson:
Thanks Jude. Happy Friday everyone. I'm sure everyone's anxious to wrap up and get home, no more so than Jude. Congrats on a wonderful conference. I'm Jeff Henderson. I'm in my second year as head of ops and tech at Interac, and before that I was in various CIO roles in the Canadian FI landscape. As it relates to RTR, we play a fairly large role and wear many hats. First and foremost is building the exchange. As you've heard earlier in the conference, the exchange was built as of last year. There's still lots of work to do on the exchange and I would highlight that we built the exchange in close partnership with IBM, so that work will continue on the exchange front and make sure that it's ready for production and operates very seamlessly with the clearing and settlement solution. Secondly, we're partnering with Payments Canada and others in the network to ensure that the RTR has appropriate fraud and directory services. And you've also heard many times through the conference you do not turn RTR on until you've got appropriate fraud in place and other jurisdictions have been very good evidence of the importance of doing so. And then thirdly, with respect to operating, as Rob touched on, we'll play a very critical role in ensuring that we're ready to operate this for all the participants and not just from the perspective of through an RTR lens, but an even broader lens when you think of Interac, e-Transfer and RTR working together as well because the transaction flow in those systems needs to be very tightly coupled with each other. So all in all a very busy next couple of years for Interac together with my partners here.

Jude Pinto:
Thank you, Jeff. We've talked a lot about different aspects of the RTR throughout the few days and one of the things that recurs is as a feeling or a topic is this renewed energy around the project and especially around this team Canada approach, this coalition for delivery. And listen, thank you all for wearing your Payments Canada pins by the way in addition to your own brands. How important is this for each of your companies and brands from being part of this team Canada approach? Well, why don't we start with Jeff, we'll go back the other order.

Jeff Henderson:
Sure. Well we start team Canada. There's nothing more Canadian than Interac first and foremost. Interac is very Canadian and very focused on providing products for Canadians and more specifically ensuring Canadians have products to help advance our digital economy. So right from the very start, and if you think about the products that Interac has in market today, Interac e-Transfer, we now have over a billion transactions a year on e-Transfer. Over a billion transactions a year, honoured our Inter-Member Network (IMN) debit and Token Service Provider (TSP) solutions and not just in payments, but in some of the adjacency complimentary products like Verified. We just rolled out a solution for the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) a little over a month ago. Over a million Canadians leveraged that solution to digitally sign up for their CRA My Account service. So very, very much strategically aligned for Interac and of course back to team Canada building for Canadians.

Jude Pinto:
Fantastic. Mike, what does it mean to you and IBM?

Mike Cook:
After our Canadian, Jeff and his Canadian point, International Business Machines was acquired in 1912 by our parent company. It was headquartered on Bloor Street in Toronto and it sold scales and cheese cutting machines. True story, the founders liked the name better. We've been IBM ever since and we've been in this country for over a century now. Our technology's changed a little bit. We've gone from punch cards to quantum, but it's the same company. It's important to us I think for our clients too. All your members, all your prospective members that Ron Morrow and his team are going to bring into the ecosystem, they're our clients. It's important for them, it's important for us to serve our clients there. They also include other clients like Air Canada, Bombardier and Manulife and these great behemoths who are looking forward to real time money movement and what it's going to do to their functions. I think lastly, it's also important personally. The leadership team that started this journey with me six, seven years ago is still here. Put two and two together. They've had incredible experiences. They're being headhunted like crazy and they remain here because this is a once in a generation opportunity to build payment market infrastructure.

Jude Pinto:
Great, thank you. Rob, what's it mean to you in CGI?

Rob Mayer:
So first of all, on behalf of CGI and I think all payment professionals globally and in Canada, because I've been hearing about this from everyone across our company, we are very proud to be a member of this new partnership. It's fantastic. We're new to this partnership, but we're not new to payments. We're not new to payments in Canada. We've had, a lot of people may not know it, but we've had a relationship with Payments Canada for almost 20 years. We've had a very deep relationship and partnership with Interac for over 20, 25 years. I don't think anyone knows how far it goes back, Jeff. I don't know if you, I don't, but it's been a long time and we have hundreds and hundreds of people working with all of you in the crowd in various payment systems and programs across the country. We truly understand how complex this environment is from our work on the central market as well as on the client base. And what you have done with a partnership here, Jude, and bring the partners together and bring the strongest partners available to fill the gap and bring their strength to the organization is fantastic. We highly support it. The partnerships we have with IBM and Interac are what are really going to make this successful going forward. CGI is a global company, but we know this is a national Canadian program and our client isn't just Payments Canada, it's all Canadians, it's all the people in this room and outside of the room. Canada is our home market. We're talking about Canadian. Our company was founded in Montreal in the basement of our founder's office with two people. So it's got its roots, it's got our roots in Canada. Canada again is our home market, Canada's head office, where head office resides. And again, kudos to you and the Payments Canada organization. You've created a culture in this team of openness, collaboration, honesty, respect and those are all the attributes of a high performance team. I think Jude, that's what you've created.

Jude Pinto:
Thanks Rob. Let's indulge some of the payment geeks in the room and just talk a little bit more about the components of what we're doing here because it includes how do we bring real-time clearing and settlement to e-Transfer? How do we build the new exchange and make it live? How do we build clearing and settlement that can deal with multiple exchanges in the future with a high degree of resiliency? How do we change the rules and the regulations and the acts for greater inclusion participation amongst members? How do we deal with emerging issues at the right time, like fraud on platforms that are technically sound and future-proofed? So let's start with you, Mike.

Mike Cook:
This is real exciting. That is that having worked with Jeff and we have an architectural platform for exchange and we have an architectural stack for exchange, we now then get to recreate that on a similar stack for C and S. Because we're going to be doing this with the custom build we also get to engineer in all of the security elements, all of the monitoring elements. So we can actually look after this thing 7/24/365. Those bits are awesome. There's a business integration though too. Any geeks out there want to talk the geeky bits, pull me aside. I don't want to bore the other room, but as Jeff said, we've learned from around the world, you don't go live without fraud. You also don't go live without volume. And Jeff and his crew bring in a whole bunch of volume over originally, but we now have integration at another level. I sat through Ron Morrow's supervisory framework for the Retail Payments Activities Act (RPAA), which was disjointed at one time from the RTR program and it's now perfectly aligned. So now that we have an architecture that's common across everything, we have an integrated fraud solution and we have an integrated framework for new participants to come in on the timeframe. We're solving two of the biggest issues of a whole bunch of empty rails around the world in terms of they're sitting there empty or they're sitting there unprotected. We're not going to be in that position here.

Jude Pinto:
That's great. Rob, over to you.

Rob Mayer:
So Jude, the objective of what we're doing on the RTR is to build an always-on environment. And what is an always-on environment? It's an environment that's highly secure, highly resilient and scalable. And that's going to be the foundation for innovation and payments in Canada for the next decade. So it's important that we get that foundation right. Four years ago, we started on a transformation journey with Interac and we implemented a client-centric services team. And what that is, it's a dedicated focus team that was put in place to manage the real-time operations of Interac in a high urgency level that's required for Prominent Payment Systems (PPS). We've got a lot of learnings from that. So what we're bringing to this as CGI is the lessons learned, the experience to get on the highway at a hundred kilometres an hour. We're already doing that for real-time processes at Interac and we're just moving into a little larger ecosystem. And it's going to take some work to get it right, but we are already doing that type of thing, components of this are high availability architecture. We can't get the end client experience of always-on unless we get that right. So we've got a lot of lessons learned from that simplification, simplification of technology. One of the main components is we've collapsed a lot of the infrastructure. We've taken out multiple infrastructure partners, we've removed networks. It's a simpler environment. Jude's cage, he's got a secure cage in the data centre, it's right beside Jeff's cage and we call it Jude and Jeff's cage, but Jude's cage is actually just masking tape on the floor right now. We've got an opportunity to really build something special. You layer on the processes, procedures, observability that we're already doing, like Mike mentioned, and we've got all the elements to have an always-on environment.

Jude Pinto:
Jeff, how do you think about the evolving technology and infrastructure in this as we're putting it in place?

Jeff Henderson:
I feel great about it. I feel great about the three of us doing this for Payments Canada and doing this for the rest of Canada. And I think that my ask and the takeaway from everybody, yes, we have a lot of work to do and a lot to prove, but what we represent is a good track record of success between Interac and CGI with our products like Interac e-Transfer. Mike and IBM and Interac partnered very effectively in building the exchange. And as I mentioned, the exchange is built. Mike and IBM have a great track record with Payments Canada and operating the settlement system for the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) replacement, the Lynx system. And so all that to say this is not three groups getting together and working together for the first time for Payments Canada in the payment landscape. We do have a great track record. This is not our first rodeo. Yes, a lot of work to do, but I think these three organizations are well positioned to deliver for the country and for Payments Canada.

Jude Pinto:
That's fantastic. So we're at time. I'm going to ask you just one more thing. What do you think the topic next year for the RTR is specifically likely to be, the discussion here at The SUMMIT, Jeff?

Jeff Henderson:
I’d like to be up here next year with the same group talking more about what we have done rather than what we're going to do.

Mike Cook:
It's funny we didn't compare these. In a similar vein, I'm a little tired talking about the hypothetical benefit to Canadians and businesses. I'm setting myself a goal to sit here on this stage with two treasurers or controllers from Bombardier, Air Canada, Manulife to talk about how they're going to use the RTR to change their world.

Jude Pinto:
Yeah, very good. Rob. Next year,

Rob Mayer:
So next year we will be talking about operational readiness and the first half of the program. There's a lot of heavy lifting for the partners that are up here on the stage, but the second half of the program is actually heavy lifting for everyone. And Jude, I would probably challenge everyone in this crowd. Team Canada is not just this group of four partners, it's all of us. And in the second half of this program and where we're going to be starting next year, we all have to be onboard. We've got momentum and it's up to us to put the foundation in place for payments for Canada.

Jude Pinto:
Very well said. Thank you guys for joining me up here. Thank you for your partnership. Officially we've been in this mode only two months, but what a set of accomplishments and traction that we've made. I hope you guys all get a sense of how much we like working with each other and how much we're working for all of you. So with that, let me thank you and we'll move on to our next session.

Mike Cook:
Thanks Jude. Thanks.

Liz Dempsey:
What a great discussion. And I think Rob said it best when he said team Canada is all of us in this room. But I'll extend that to everyone listening today and beyond, real-time payments are coming to Canada and it will be a major game changer for all of us. It's exciting times. With all of the great developments with the RTR and our other payment modernization initiatives be sure to stay connected by visiting our website payments.ca and sign up for our newsletter, the Exchange. And be sure to visit thesummit.ca for the latest information on next year's conference happening in Toronto from May 6 to 8 2025. Thanks for listening to this episode of The PayPod