Canada

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “2025 State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the United States,” commissioned by Block, found that financial institutions are recognizing that fraud itself is a networked phenomenon.

Criminal groups share tools, mule accounts, compromised credentials and customer service scripts. They test defenses collaboratively, iterating on what works and abandoning what does not. In many cases, the same infrastructure is used to target multiple firms across industries.

This reality undermines the assumption that fraud can be contained within organizational boundaries, the report revealed. A weakness in one company can become an entry point into an entire sector. Synthetic identities created at a FinTech, for example, may later be used to exploit retailers, lenders or marketplaces. Phishing campaigns that succeed against one brand can often spill over to others, using shared consumer behaviors and expectations.

What makes these threats especially daunting is their adaptiveness. Fraudsters are running sophisticated operations, often using the same advanced analytics and automation tools as their targets. In response, financial institutions must deploy multilayered, intelligence-driven defenses that are capable of not just detecting but predicting and pre-empting attacks.

The arms race is increasingly evolving into a contest of network effects and learning algorithms.

Collaboration as a Resilience Multiplier

When fraud operates as a network, defense must do the same. Information sharing, coordinated response and collective learning become essential. This does not require full transparency or the abandonment of competitive advantage. It does entail a willingness to acknowledge that some threats are pre-competitive and that addressing them collectively can benefit all participants.

Early warning is one of the most powerful tools available, according to the report. Knowing what attacks are emerging, which vectors are being tested, and where defenses are failing can shorten response times.

Technology providers play a central role. By aggregating signals across clients, they can identify anomalies and trends that no single organization could see alone. When these insights are fed back into customer environments, they create a virtuous cycle of learning and adaptation.

The emphasis on collaboration is driven in part by the reality that fraudsters do not need to breach the strongest defenses if they can exploit the weakest link. As supply chains, platforms and digital ecosystems become more interconnected, vulnerabilities propagate more easily. A compromised partner, vendor or customer account can serve as a launchpad for broader attacks.

Read the report: Banks Face a Fraud Spike as Attacks Outpace Legacy Systems

Machine learning systems are now integral to fraud prevention, with 70% of institutions reporting active use of behavioral analytics and 61% using machine learning in their defenses. The combination enables a new breed of adaptive, real-time detection capable of surfacing anomalous behaviors that rules-based systems would miss.

But therein lies the report’s most troubling revelation. Nearly 1 in 5 financial institutions, especially small and regional banks, still operate without these advanced technologies.

A new playbook is emerging that prioritizes diversification and collaboration over monolithic in-house solutions, the report found.

About half of all financial institutions plan to expand the outsourcing of fraud prevention to third parties and increase their use of cloud-based fraud platforms. Others are investing in deep learning, improved customer communications, and the development of hybrid, adaptive systems.

Ultimately, modern fraud is a systemic challenge, not a siloed one, according to the report. The modernization divide can be a vulnerability for all, not just the laggards. Resilience is no longer a back-office metric; it is becoming the foundation of long-term value in a digital-first economy.

At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.

Innovations begin as features, become expectations and eventually harden into infrastructure.

Credit cards, ACH and online banking all followed this trajectory. Those former innovations can now feel almost quaint.

Instant payouts are now crossing this threshold. The shift has implications for businesses, platforms and financial institutions. It suggests that payments strategy is no longer primarily about cost optimization or back-end efficiency. It is about shaping user behavior, loyalty and trust.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Beyond Speed: The Case for Instant Payout Adoption and Stickiness,” a collaboration with Ingo Payments, found that once consumers experience instant payouts, they rarely want to go back.

According to the report, 57% of recipients who receive an instant payment go on to make it their most-used payout method, up from 39% in 2020. That is not a marginal shift; it is a behavioral inflection point. In just a few years, instant payments have crossed the threshold from novelty to norm. They are no longer something users simply try.

They are something users adopt, then demand.

The Role of Habit Formation Across Financial Behavior

Consumers are not sampling instant payments. They are internalizing them.

Payments are repetitive behaviors. People interact with them frequently, often subconsciously. Once a particular payout method becomes the default, it shapes how users engage with a platform. They log in more often, cash out more frequently, and feel more in control of their finances.

Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in what the report called “transactional payroll.” For millions of Americans, such as gig workers, freelancers, contractors, marketplace sellers and others, payouts have replaced traditional paychecks. Income arrives irregularly, from multiple sources, and often in response to completed tasks rather than time worked.

In this context, immediacy isn’t a convenience. It’s liquidity.

The report revealed that instant payouts are stickiest where disbursements matter most. Among recipients for whom payouts represent core cash flow, nearly 7 in 10 one-time instant users become regulars. These workers rely on speed not to optimize spending, but to manage rent, groceries, gas and childcare.

Read the report: Beyond Speed: The Case for Instant Payout Adoption and Stickiness

At the same time, not all instant payment rails are equal. The report showed that digital wallets are the most effective at converting occasional users into regulars. Compared with bank account deposits, digital wallets are more successful at building habits to the tune of 58%.

On paper, an instant payout to a bank account and an instant payout to a digital wallet may both settle in seconds. In practice, they feel different.

Digital wallets offer immediacy plus usability. Money is not just received quickly; it is immediately visible, actionable and integrated into a broader financial ecosystem. Users can spend, transfer or store value without friction.

Instant bank deposits, by contrast, often land in environments that were not designed for real-time interaction. The money may arrive quickly, but it can still feel inert, locked behind batch processing, legacy interfaces or delayed availability for certain transactions.

The superior conversion performance of digital wallets highlights that instant payments are not just about how fast money arrives, but about what users can do next.

The most important takeaway from the report is not that instant payments are growing. It is that they are becoming instinctive.

When more than half of users who try instant payouts make them their primary method, the market has crossed a psychological threshold. This is no longer about early adopters or edge cases. It is about how people expect money to behave.

As with all instincts, once formed, they are difficult to unlearn.

At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.

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.

The pay later company and the travel search engine have offered services to travelers in the United States since 2023 and are now bringing their collaboration to Canada, Kayak said in a Thursday (May 22) press release.

“Consumers are increasingly turning to Affirm when booking their flights, hotels, rides and more as flexible payment options remain a top priority for travelers across Canada,” Affirm Chief Revenue Officer Wayne Pommen said in the release. “This expansion with Kayak is a natural next step for our long-standing partnership as we look to offer even more travelers peace of mind when paying for their next trip using Affirm.”

By choosing Affirm at checkout on Kayak’s Canadian website, approved travelers can split the cost of flights, accommodations, and car rentals or car sharing into monthly payments, according to the release.

Affirm already works with several other travel companies, including Booking Holdings brands Agoda, Booking.com and Priceline, which itself owns Kayak.

Kayak Chief Product Officer Matthias Keller discussed with PYMNTS Thursday the company’s launch of Kayak.ai, a conversational travel booking assistant powered by generative artificial intelligence.

“This is not just a chatbot,” Keller said. “It’s a ChatGPT just built for travel. You can ask any travel question, and in a conversation, you get real-life rates that are also bookable on Kayak.”

Kayak.ai was created to emulate natural human conversation and the kind of planning a traveler might do with a knowledgeable agent or friend. It isn’t fully automated, but future versions of the assistant will allow for seamless and even semi-autonomous bookings within the chat itself, Keller said.

“Right now, it’s more like an attended booking within the chat,” he said. “You’ll still see what you’re booking, confirm the price, and maybe enter your credit card. But over time, this could get more and more semi-automated. Maybe you leave your details, and the booking happens in the background.”

Meanwhile, Kayak’s integrations with major airlines, hotel chains and global distribution systems (GDS) offer it a competitive edge, Keller said.