Canada’s New Real-Time Rails Get Bank of America’s Attention

Watch more: Bank of America Equips Canadian Businesses for Real-Time Treasury

Canada’s payments landscape is being recast at high speed, and the once-predictable routines of corporate treasurers are being pushed into the digital fast lane.

The change is as much cultural as technological for the practitioners who sit at the center of cash management.

“I have been on the ground here in Canada … for over 25 years,” Lyndsay Langford, Bank of America’s head of Global Payment Solutions for Canada, told PYMNTS. “In the past, we had wires, EFT and checks. Today, clients demand faster payments, less friction and richer remittance data.”

Those demands have forced treasury teams to abandon manual processes and build real-time visibility into positions and forecasts. The pandemic “shifted us toward a more digital mindset,” accelerating projects that once sat on multiyear road maps, she said.

That shift is playing out against a sweeping upgrade of Canada’s underlying rails. Payments Canada began its modernization plan in 2016, replacing the legacy wire system with Lynx and preparing the country’s first real-time rail (RTR).

“We’re heavily focused right now as a country on the buildout and the launch of real-time payments,” Langford said.

Once live, RTR will settle payments in seconds, carry data-rich messages and eventually enable QR-code requests for payment and cross-border links to other real-time payment methods. Interac — once a person-to-person tool — now supports near-instant business-to-consumer disbursements. Two years ago, Bank of America folded the channel into its global digital disbursements platform alongside Zelle and PayPal.

The glue that makes many of those ambitions useful to a treasurer is ISO 20022, a global messaging standard that expands the amount of information that can travel with each transaction. Bank of America has been running a formal ISO migration program since 2019 and has already completed “over 10 clearing migrations around the world,” Langford said.

Early Canadian adopters are exploiting the richer data to “remove a lot of manual work from the reconciliation process,” she said because ERP systems can auto-match invoices to payments the moment funds hit. The bank is building direct ISO feeds into corporate accounting platforms to maximize straight-through processing.

Risk Mitigation

Yet data alone does not erase the uncertainty of sending money across borders. Pandemic shocks, geopolitical tension and exchange rate swings have only amplified that uncertainty.

“Risk mitigation for cross-border payments is rising to the top of the priority list,” Langford said.

Bank of America’s answer includes a guaranteed foreign exchange (FX) rate solution that allows clients to lock in an FX rate for up to a year — “market leading” in tenor, she said — and CashPro Forecasting, a machine learning tool that predicts liquidity needs so companies can “make more intelligent working capital decisions” and pivot when volatility strikes.

Speed, meanwhile, is not always paramount.

“We want to make sure the options we put in front of clients are cost‑effective and fast where speed is important,” Langford said.

Still, the bank also aims for a globally consistent user experience so a Canadian treasurer responsible for Asia or Europe sees the same interface and controls.

Much of that experience is delivered through CashPro, Bank of America’s digital treasury suite used by more than 40,000 corporate clients worldwide. When the bank combined its Global Transaction Services and Enterprise Payments teams under the banner of Global Payment Solutions in 2023, it created a pipeline for ideas developed in the retail bank to flow into the commercial platform. The most visible import is CashPro Chat, built on the artificial intelligence backbone that powers Erica, Bank of America’s consumer virtual assistant. The tool lets treasurers ask questions and receive 24/7 answers from an “intelligent virtual service advisor,” escalating more complex issues to human specialists, Langford said.

“The more we collectively use it, the more it learns and grows,” she said.

Integration has also sped product rollouts. A U.S. electronic payments collections service that lets businesses accept card and ACH payments will soon debut in Canada after clients “raved about it for years,” she said, illustrating how the new structure “allows us to consider how investments can be leveraged more broadly.”

Listening to the Pros

Listening to clients is as important as engineering. CashPro advisory boards meet regularly “with clients around the world, and that includes right here on the ground in Canada,” ensuring new features target the highest priority wishes, Langford said.

The next inflection point is already on the horizon. The Retail Payment Activities Act will allow nonbank providers to participate directly in the RTR, intensifying competition and giving corporates more ways to customize how they pay and get paid.

“With this complexity, … the goal is to make things easier as they become more complex,” Langford said.

She said she expects that competitive pressure — and the data fabric of ISO 20022 — will trigger a wave of innovation in financing, supply‑chain optimization and value-added analytics.

“The real-time rail will be the platform for future innovation in Canada,” Langford said. “It’s going to increase competition, and when you have increased competition that benefits all Canadians — consumers and commercial entities alike.”

For treasurers, the tools are arriving quickly, and those who master them will turn liquidity management from a back-office chore into a source of strategic advantage.

“We need to be at the table — and we are at the table — to ensure our clients’ voices drive the next three- to five-year journey,” Langford said.