After Outage, Payment Service Interac Adds New Provider

Toronto-based online payment service Interac is adding a network provider following an outage at Rogers Communications last week that prevented millions of Canadians from making online payments.

“We are adding a supplier [besides Rogers] to strengthen our existing network redundancy so Canadians can continue to rely on Interac daily,” Interac said, per a Monday (July 11) Reuters report.

Interac operates an email money transfer service used by several Canadian banks. The company did not specify which network provider it will use as a backup, according to the report.

PYMNTS spoke to Interac late last month about its role in bringing real-time payments to Canada, a move scheduled to happen next year. Last year, Interac was designated as a Prominent Payments System (PPS) by the Bank of Canada, an indication of the importance of the system to Canada’s economy and its financial system as a whole.

Read more: Canada’s Real-Time Rollout Offers Glimpse of Payments Possibilities

“Their rationale and reason for this designation was due to the prominence of the service in the country, as in the number of users, the number of financial institutions and the amount of volume that is going through the service,” Anurag Kar, assistant vice president of money movement products at Interac, told PYMNTS.

“It’s fully ingrained in the retail consumer’s [financial flow] in Canada,” he said, adding that “a lot of businesses, micro, small or even medium-sized businesses, use the service.”

In late May, Interac announced it had hit a “money movement milestone,” with customers using its eTransfer service making more than 1 billion transactions each year. The milestone, which the company achieved in April, was a first in Interac’s two-decade history and represented a 16% transaction increase compared to the previous 12 months.

See more: Interac Marks 1B Annual eTransfers