Speech: Remarks from the Economic Club of Canada's panel, 'Canada’s Insurance CEOs: Leading Through Risk, Resilience and Change'
This speech was originally delivered at Economic Club of Canada on October 20, 2026. Minor changes to the following remarks may have occurred during delivery.
AUTHOR
Stephanie Zee
Chief Product Officer, Payments Canada
Stephanie Zee defines, leads and executes Payments Canada’s enterprise-wide product strategy. She is the senior representative for payment product strategy with members, regulators and ecosystem stakeholders.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for having me. It is a privilege to address you today at this impressive event, thank you to the Economic Club of Canada for hosting it.
I’m Stephanie Zee, Chief Product Officer at Payments Canada.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with us, Payments Canada owns and operates Canada’s national clearing and settlement infrastructure, which include the technology systems, by-laws, rules and standards. As custodians of this critical infrastructure, our mission is to enable prosperity, productivity and safety for Canada through trusted, world-class payments.
The Canadian economy depends on the exchange of billions of dollars each day. We make it happen, moving over $400 billion per day across our systems in 2025.
On today’s theme of leading through change, some of you may know that we are approaching the launch of Canada's Real-Time Rail (RTR) in the coming weeks, a truly generational investment in our collective prosperity.
The RTR is Canada’s new national payment system with centralized fraud services that will allow Canadians to send and receive data-rich payments in real-time. These payments will not only be sent and received in real-time, but they will also clear and settle between their financial institutions and payment service providers in real-time, 24/7, 365 days a year.
The RTR is a critical pillar of building Canada’s digital public infrastructure that is made in Canada, for Canada. Recent federal legislative changes mean that for both Fintech innovators and smaller financial institutions, the RTR is a platform for innovative payment options driving more choice and competition for consumers and businesses.
Recent research from the C.D. Howe Institute underscores the macroeconomic impact this system will provide for Canada. The addition of the RTR to our national payment infrastructure will greatly reduce the systemic costs of manual processing, heavy cheque usage and float costs from deferred settlement, generating between 5.3 billion and 14.5 billion dollars in cumulative cost savings over the next decade.
Additionally, the RTR has the potential to add $16 billion in cumulative gross domestic product gains over ten years, representing a permanent annual boost to Canada's economy.
For Canada's insurance sector, the benefits of this modern infrastructure are direct and transformative.
The Real-Time Rail will empower insurance providers through their financial institutions to send and receive data-rich payments in real time.
This immediate availability of funds will allow policyholders to receive emergency claims without waiting for electronic transfers or paper cheques to clear, benefits that would add to customer trust and positivity to their experience. Think about what this can mean for a family or a small business in the aftermath of experiencing an emergency.
Simultaneously, data standards tied to these transactions have the potential to streamline premium collection, simplify administrative reconciliation and back-end processing. These results would enable operational cost savings, better enterprise liquidity management and increasing customer experience, leading to customer loyalty.
But, speed in money movement must always be matched by security. Canada's RTR will be one of the first systems globally to launch with participant fraud mitigation requirements from day one, including Confirmation of Payee. These robust tools mitigate the growing concern of fraud, demonstrating trust in the system which in turn benefits the entire financial ecosystem.
Delivering world-class critical national infrastructure for our country requires a true team Canada effort alongside our members, regulators and industry leaders like yourselves. Our collective goal is to ensure the market is ready for participation as we approach our launch, unlocking new economic possibilities for all Canadians and businesses.
I look forward to learning from the interesting conversation this morning. Thank you.
