Interac Says Small Innovations Will Bring Outsized Digital Payments Benefit

Market disruptions, innovations and collaborations will continue to challenge traditional payment methods, Interac AVP Anurag Kar writes in the new PYMNTS eBook, “2023 Payments New Year’s Resolutions.”

The payments industry has undergone a tremendous digital revolution amid rapidly shifting consumer expectations and market demand in the last decade. Out of necessity, businesses adapted to deliver better customer experiences for everyday purchases like online shopping, food delivery and grocery orders.

Expectations for seamless digital B2B payment experiences will only rise as secure, frictionless and interoperable payment methods displace the cash and check transactions that many businesses still rely on, fueling the next wave of digital disruption.

In 2023, market disruptions, innovations and collaborations will continue to deliver seamless digital experiences that challenge the status quo of traditional payment methods. At Interac, we’re focused on optimizing our solutions to help Canadians, Canadian businesses and the broader Canadian financial services ecosystem modernize their payment processes, educate about new solutions that drive value and enable a rapidly changing ecosystem.

May it be with simple experiences for digital donation collections, faster processing of government support payments or enabling industry-specific payment needs, Interac continues to identify solutions on a national scale. Recently surpassing 1 billion transactions over 12 months, Interac e-Transfer is one of the most widely-used digital payment products in Canada. It has become synonymous with providing a fast, convenient and secure way to send money to anyone from within their online or mobile banking platform. While created as a person-to-person (P2P) check/cash replacement service, it has become a standard that businesses have adopted. Our continued commitment to meeting the needs of all Canadians has been the design principle behind new product launches, feature enhancements and market-driven solutions.

A more recent feature, request-to-pay (R2P), has quickly emerged as a practical option for businesses to streamline their accounts receivable activities. Businesses have the option to integrate R2Ps within their experiences for a 1-to-1 collection capability or use a host-to-host format to collect payments en masse. Initially targeted to displace paper payments, R2Ps have quickly emerged as an alternative to credit cards for small businesses. The capability comes with many other benefits like the ability to reference remittance data, notify end users, payment life cycle management and transaction reconciliation.

Traditionally cash-heavy use cases, like micro-merchants purchasing and charity donation box collections, are also opportunities to digitize the payment experience, providing added data to reconcile transactions and garner insights to drive efficiencies. The ethos at Interac has always been to help solve macro payment industry problems through micro value-add use-case solutioning. Examples of our solutions in the market have led to unmanned donation kiosks to government support disbursements to millions of Canadians, instantly, in lieu of checks. These solutions continue to broaden access to digital payments for the market, drive incremental value for their payment life cycles and deliver adjacent value-add services to minimize their operational dependencies on ad-hoc processes.

Working with the Canadian Financial Services ecosystem to bring these technologies to market over the year will encourage wider adoption, create new revenue streams for businesses and provide Canadians with market-leading payment solutions.