Episode 36: The Real-Time Rail: an update on our approach to delivery and beyond

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Transcript of the recording

Elizabeth (Liz) Dempsey:
Hi everyone, and welcome back to The PayPod. I'm your host, Liz Dempsey, and today we're revisiting one of my favorite main stage sessions from The 2025 Payments Canada SUMMIT, The Real-Time Rail, an update on our approach to delivery and beyond.

In this episode, our Chief Delivery Officer, Jude Pinto, is joined by our RTR delivery partners to talk about the RTR program successes over the last year. You'll hear about our Team Canada approach to delivering a new payment system to Canada, and what we'll be talking about in a year from now.

Moderated by Jude, the panel also features Rob Mayer of CGI, Jeff Mulholland from IBM, John Collinson of Interac and Todd Roberts from Deloitte. I hope you enjoy it as much as our audience at The SUMMIT did.

Jude Pinto:
Hello everyone and thank you for joining us as we discuss at least a very popular, if not everyone's favorite topic, the delivery of the Real-Time Rail payment system (RTR) for the benefit of Canada. My name is Jude Pinto and I'm your moderator for today, whether you are here in the room or tuning in on demand, welcome, bienvenue. 

I'm joined on stage today by the RTR’s key delivery partners, also known as Team Canada, and we have a lot to discuss about delivering the RTR to Canada as a team, because a lot has changed in a year. 

At The 2024 SUMMIT we had just recently reinitiated the RTR program after a period of risk mitigation and replanning. Today I'm so proud that the build of the RTR system in its entirety, technical build, including centralized fraud services, is on track to complete in Q3 of this year. 

I'm just going to take a second to give props and thank yous to the number of teams that are out there that have contributed to this. In all of the firms that you're going to hear from, standing behind all of us in Payments Canada, in each of the firms over here, there are literally hundreds of people that are involved, and throughout the ecosystem, this has not just been this team's delivery, it's been the entire ecosystem including regulators and members and future members that have all been part of this effort. So what an accomplishment for this uniquely made in Canada, Canadian payment system and it's a testament to our approach to delivery. 

And with more on this, let's get to our discussion Now, time is very limited, but let's combine quick intros with your view of the biggest achievements in the last year since we last were on this stage. So each of your organizations are responsible for delivering a core component of the RTR and the program. For the audience, what are the components that you're responsible for and what were your biggest achievements since we were all together at The SUMMIT last year? Let's start with you, Rob.

Rob Mayer:
Thanks Jude. First of all, it's a pleasure to be here again in front of The SUMMIT and I wanted to say we really appreciate the leadership that you've provided in the program. My name's Rob Mayer and I lead Central Market Infrastructure and the Payments group for CGI. Today, we provide operational delivery services for Interac and Payments Canada. Within the RTR program, CGI is responsible for the design and build of the infrastructure and we'll also be supporting Interac’s ongoing technical operations, very similar to what we do with e-Transfer today. And before diving into the accomplishments, I really did want to recognize the communication and collaboration across all the partners. We've tackled a lot of very difficult problems over the last 12 months, and this collaboration has been essential to getting us to where we are today.

The infrastructure build is one of the first critical path items in the program, and I'm pleased to share that we're on track to deliver to the application deployment teams in July. This four data center build is a significant milestone and it is highly technical and complex, but the achievement goes far beyond building “Jude's cage” that we talked about last year and beyond building hardware and networks, the greatest achievement was really the architectural alignment that we obtained across all the partners, stakeholders, participants, Bank of Canada; it was incredible to achieve what we did to get that alignment. This alignment was critical foundation to going forward with the physical build as well as the application and it was really key to the program.

Jude Pinto:
Fantastic, thanks Rob. John, over to you.

John Collinson:
Thanks Jude. Good afternoon everyone. I'm John Collinson. I'm the head of RTR Technology and Operations over at Interac. Interac really wears three hats in this journey: We have the accountability for the software engineering of the RTR Exchange, we're also building the Interac fraud service and, as of last fall, we were appointed as the Technical Operator of the RTR.

From an achievements perspective, we're about to complete the uplift of the replatforming of the RTR Exchange. It was completed functionally a couple of years ago, but in alignment with the architecture that we just talked about, we've had to make the uplift to bring that into alignment. We've done a lot of great work in the early part of this year and we'll finish that shortly around building the Interac fraud service, and with our selection as the technical operator, we've got the technical operating model defined, we've got a lot of hiring in place and we're actively working to get those operational accountabilities stood up so that we can actively support both the testing processes as we go through that and be ready to take on operations later next year.

Jude Pinto: 
Fantastic. Thanks John. Jeff, over to you.

Jeff Mulholland:
Thanks Jude. I'm with IBM consulting. I'm the Lead Client Partner for Payments Canada, and amongst my other jobs, I am the Delivery Partner for Payments Canada on the RTR. So as part of the IBM job, we are the overall SI on the program, making sure that everything runs correctly and gets implemented, but there's really two key components that we're responsible for. 

The first is complimentary to John's piece. We built the RTR Clearing and Settlement application that handles all the clearing and settlement between the participants at the bank level, and that was a built from scratch, made in Canada solution to address very unique Canadian requirements, and we're pleased to announce that that is 80% complete on that side, which was a very key piece of the solution and on track to complete on Jude's build timeline. 

The second part I think that often gets overlooked was the part that Rob talked about. Most of the time when you build a new application, you're installing it somewhere that already exists. Rob's team with the help of the IBM team is building up four new data centers, with the plumbing sort of from the ground up, so that is a cage, that is hardware, that is software that is monitoring and everything that goes with it. So that's just a huge amount of work for the two teams and they've been working together as a single team to deliver that.

Jude Pinto: 
Okay, Todd, over to you.

Todd Roberts:
So Jude, thanks for having us all here today. And if you look at the size of this crowd, everyone cares about what we are doing. We have the privilege of being able to assist Payments Canada in assuring the overall integration of the program. I like to think of us, at times, as the glue that makes sure that all the stones are turned over, and that we know everything that has to work together for the totality of this program to work. I'm really, really proud to say that this program has never, ever, ever been in better space than it is right now.

If you look at the beliefs and the conviction that we have on our ability to meet the dates in front of us, we have exceptionally high visibility into the details, and the work that's going to be ahead of us, we also understand. So how do the four parties work together, how do the participants connect to us? We have never been in a better spot. And so I think when you folks compare it this year to previous years, previous years were aspirational, this is the one where we're actually talking about what it is that we're doing.

Jude Pinto:
Fantastic, thanks Todd. And now let's turn ourselves to what's happening next. Here we are in May of 2025. Internally, on the program, as we talked about, we'll finish the technical build and we'll get into a heavy period of testing and then we'll get into exciting aspects of deployment and onboarding and setting up sandboxes for Charles-Andre to be able to participate in. But from your perspective, what do you see as your focus right now, in your firms, to give people a sense of what's top of mind for each of you? Let's go to Rob first.

Rob Mayer:
Sure. Like I said, we've got a couple more months of work to do on the non-prod environments, and that's in great shape to be handed off well before July. And after that, we'll be focusing on the production equipment built. We've set up the production networks, but we've got the rest of the environment to set up, and that'll be completed before the end of the calendar year. After that, we'll be shifting to supporting all the test phases, from an infrastructure and an operations perspective, with Interac, and that will take us throughout the rest of the year. Our goal is to really ensure the infrastructure and application can handle all the volumes and peak volumes we see on e-Transfer today, and to make sure we all have confidence going forward.

Jude Pinto:
That's fantastic. I think that notion, a lot of questions I've heard of the last couple of days, just around what is testing going to look like, how many phases are there, how long it's going to take. People's minds have moved past the technical build into those sets of questions, so it's rewarding to hear that. John, over to you, what's top of mind for you?

John Collinson:
Really three things Jude. One is obviously finishing the build both for our RTR Exchange, Interac fraud, but also as many of you're aware, e-Transfer is going to integrate with the RTR and we need to make those changes to the e-Transfer APIs so that the partner ecosystem can properly prepare for the work they also need to do. Secondly is actively support and participate in the testing process as we go through the next year. There's definitely a lot of testing, both from a functional non-functional operational readiness perspective. That will be a big priority. And then the third focus for us will be around truly being ready to operate, making sure we've got the whole ecosystem stood up from an Interac perspective to properly and successfully perform the role of the technical operator.

Jude Pinto:
Fantastic. And Jeff…

Jeff Mulholland:
May come as no surprise. I'm going to echo my partner statements: Testing, testing and more testing. We have to do systems integration testing to make sure all the pieces work together properly, including the indirect pieces with e-Transfer and fraud. We need to do operability testing the platform. So if the underlying platform doesn't work properly, it's no good having an application that functions on top of it. And finally, we need to do performance testing, right? It's a 7/24/365 system with very short response time tolerances, so that all has to work at very high volumes. So we are focused for the next year completely on test.

Jude Pinto:
Okay. Todd, Deloitte’s focus.

Todd Roberts:
So our focus is going to be making sure that we stay on plan. That may sound easy, but to make sure you stay on plan, you have to be proactive about identifying issues before they become problems. Every single month we provide Jude with our perspectives, an independent review of what's going well and what needs to be tightened up. I think the most important thing is that we all here have to stay committed to making sure that we have practical answers. We are going to find ourselves in the rough at various points in time. The issue is not do we end up in the rough, the issue is how do we act effectively as a group to make sure that we get out of it. So our focus is going to be making sure that we help you, Jude and team see around the corners. We make sure that all of the participants' views are held, but also that we hold ourselves mutually accountable to sticking to the plan that we've committed to our nation to deliver.

Jude Pinto:
That's fantastic. Yeah, that is starting to summarize a ton of the work involved over the next year. By the time we get to The SUMMIT a year from now, a few streams that we didn't touch upon that are happening in parallel.

There's a lot of work on the regulatory framework, adjustments and by-laws and rules that are being put out. There's a public consultation happening now. You'll see a series of videos around how those are emerging, a lot of interest happening on that front. 

That's in addition to the technical stuff that we talked about here. Operational readiness of course, as John touched on, a huge topic internally. So turning beyond just the testing of what's been built. 

And another, I'd say then what's grown to about 30% of the dialogue that's happening, which is very rewarding, is our discussions around what does a new participant need to understand how to become a member and how to come in direct and what are the different options on that basis. And also if I'm an existing Interac e-Transfer user, what will that look like for us as we go through that? So that transition journey discussion is very rich and happening right now too, so that work is also underway and top of mind over the next few quarters. 

So we're almost at the end of our time, and I asked this last year, we should have played the clip of what we said last year to this question, but I'll refresh myself later on tonight, when we all reconvene at The 2026 SUMMIT and you all join me back on this stage, what will be the one big thing that we'll be talking about at this time next year, or your firm's area focus in your specific role in this program at this time next year? Why don't we start with Todd this time.

Todd Roberts:
So I think what we're going to be talking about next year is going live. So in order to go live, we're going to have to have steps behind us. We know that those are coming, like technical integration. I think the big thing is going to be participant readiness. So how do we ensure that Payments Canada is good, Interac’s good, but all of you have taken the steps necessary to be able to execute with confidence. Looking at Erica's comments earlier today, how do we make sure that it is safe, that it's tested and that we know that it's going to perform at scale. This is the biggest implementation that we will have ever done in payments, judged by scale, the number of participants and the impact that it has in the daily lives of Canadians. So we need to be talking aggressively about why are we moving at pace, how are we already, and how do we also know that this is going to work? Because there's going to be no dress rehearsal on this one.

Jude Pinto:
Fantastic. Well, there might be a dress rehearsal. Sure. So a different sort, but get the point for sure. Rob, over to you.

Rob Mayer:
I don't mean to repeat it, but from an operational and infrastructure perspective, readiness from the center is what is going to be the key focus from a CGI perspective. By then, we will have performed multiple rounds of testing, functional performance, technical testing, and we'll have a lot of data. So our focus will be around fine tuning the networks, the infrastructure and the applications to make sure we're optimized for high volume real-time performance. The ultimate goal from a CGI perspective and infrastructure perspective as part of the operations team is to ensure we have full confidence in the overall solution and we're ready to move into very smooth operations. And I'm looking forward to boring operations. That's my goal.

Jude Pinto:
Fantastic. John, this time next year.

John Collinson:
This time next year, I hope we're talking about the success we've had in testing. I think we're going to be collaborating with many people in this room, not just on testing the RTR, but testing e-Transfer and making sure that we are truly ready to give this capability to Canadians. We have to have that confidence as a group, and I'm hoping that's the dialogue we're having because we'll have great results for the last 12 months behind us.

Jude Pinto: 
Fantastic. Jeff?

Jeff Mulholland:
I think I'm going to build off some comments that the rest of the team has made. I think if we look back to last year, it was very aspirational. This year we're showing what we can do. Next year, I hope you're all convinced by what we've done and that we're going. And although the deployment is absolutely critical, I really hope at this stage we're talking about how we're going to use the RTR. The RTR is just an infrastructure that we're laying down and it's the use of the RTR that will be the interesting part, and that's where we're going to need all of you in the audience to figure out what the use cases are and how you're going to use it.

Jude Pinto:
Fantastic. And I'll just add one thing to build on this time next year, this tentative discussions we've been having around membership and participation and paths to participation will be a reality, and we'll be talking much more openly about what's the lineup starting to look like, especially with RPAA, having taken effect at that point and a number of paths opening up. Once again, to you and all of your teams and a lot of the audience out here who have been participating and contributing, thank you. Thank you reps, for this discussion on the stage and thank you. Phenomenal year of progress.

Elizabeth (Liz) Dempsey:
Wow, what a great panel, and based on how hot the topic of real-time payments was at this year's conference, I'm sure you can appreciate the RTR program updates as much as I do. It's definitely exciting times for real-time payments in Canada. If you'd like to see more content from The 2025 SUMMIT, please visit our website, thesummit.ca to watch all of our on-demand offerings. There are some great sessions from domestic and international speakers that I'm sure you'll enjoy. Thanks again for tuning in to this episode of The PayPod.