A new era of payments in North America

 

Full Episode Transcript

Ellie Duncan

Hello and welcome to the Open Banking Expo Unplugged podcast with me, your host as always, Ellie Duncan. Now, for this episode, I'm really pleased to be joined by Reuben Piryatinsky, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Altitude Consulting. And we'll come on to find out more about Reuben's expertise and what he does at Altitude, of course.

But for this episode, we're going to be talking about the intersection of open banking and real-time payments in Canada. In fact, Reuben has been attending Open Banking Expo Canada pretty much since we launched, I think, and earlier this year, he moderated one of the panels at our Canada Expo. So, it's really good to have you on the podcast, Reuben. Welcome.

Reuben Piryatinsky

Thank you, Ellie. Pleasure to be here.

Ellie Duncan

Well, let's find out a bit more about you first for those of our listeners who aren't familiar with you. Obviously, as I said, you're really active in open banking and payments in North America, but tell us about yourself and also Altitude Consulting. What do you do?

Reuben Piryatinsky

Of course. I started Altitude in 2020 after having spent approximately two decades in financial services. Throughout my career, I've launched some very popular products in the industry, including products that are part of the Bloomberg Terminal, various trading applications, wealth management solutions at global banks. I've also built two fintech companies from the ground up.

And I've noticed throughout my work the same common themes that were repeating: access to data was always a challenge, customer experiences were mostly one-size-fits-all experiences, and in general, digital services offered by established financial institutions were not fully digitized. Even with a digital front end, there was still a lot of manual processing in the back end. Now, on the flip side, as a fintech, partnering with a financial institution was always a challenge. So, getting those really amazing customer experiences and innovations was always challenging to get into the hands of the masses.

So, at Altitude, my goal is to fix the broken pieces in financial services and create financial services that are connected and intelligent. Today's consumers expect the same customer experience from their financial institutions as they get from Google, Apple, Amazon, where you have immediacy, we have fully featured capabilities that are personalized to you. And we call that connected intelligent banking at Altitude. So, we're working with large and mid-sized financial institutions to identify growth opportunities and launch new and innovative products that are leveraging open banking, real-time payments, and hyper-personalization.

Ellie Duncan

Great. And, you know, your experience there having started up fintechs yourself means, you know, you've been in the weeds of it, you've seen what it takes to start a fintech and to grow it, and then obviously that's something that, you know, you can apply in your role now. Let's talk about, you know, real-time payments then in North America. So, perhaps you can kind of set the scene for us a bit. What is the current state of real-time payments there? What are the rails that are available and what's coming along the line?

Reuben Piryatinsky

I'll start from the US first, because that's where North American real-time payments have been first to market. So, in the US, real-time payments have been around since 2017 with the RTP, real-time payment standard, operated by The Clearing House. And then in 2023, there was a second rail launched by the Federal Reserve, and that's FedNow.

Canada, on the other hand, had a capability for almost two decades—actually over two decades now—called Interac e-Transfer, which is transactions/transfers for small amounts, small value amounts up to $10,000. That's been around for over two decades, as I said. The experience is near real-time, so within minutes to up to an hour for deposits to arrive at the recipient's account. However, the settlement there was not real-time. The settlement was happening nightly. And this year, 2026, Canada is launching its real-time rail, called or abbreviated as RTR.

Ellie Duncan

Yeah, and that's been a long time coming, really. But it's exciting that real-time rail is on the horizon now. Something else that's on the horizon in Canada, and that's been talked about a lot, is stablecoins. So, the Bank of Canada, in its budget, talked about, you know, supporting the regulation of a fiat-backed stablecoin in Canada. So, they'll be overseeing that. And that is obviously not happening in a vacuum. You know, we've seen many other jurisdictions and countries launch their own stablecoins. Probably the biggest kind of news there is the US and the GENIUS Act, which has been signed, and also this proposed CLARITY Act in the US. So, can you tell us a bit more there, Reuben, in terms of the timing? Why is this happening now? You know, the Bank of Canada has decided now is the time to look at stablecoins.

Reuben Piryatinsky

Yes, the Bank of Canada is putting a big emphasis on stablecoins because stablecoins are growing in popularity, not only in Canada, also in the US and other parts of the world. And consumer and corporate demand for stablecoins is definitely there. We're seeing a lot of new use cases that are being launched all over the world with stablecoins. In Canada, they need to be sure that stablecoin transactions are regulated. Canada's financial system is known for its stability and soundness, so safety, stability, and risk management are key here. And regulation of stablecoins is becoming inevitable in order to preserve that stability and soundness for Canadians.

Now, the US has launched, as you said, its GENIUS Act and approved it in 2025. And that provides a regulatory framework for stablecoins as a payment instrument. And Canada is following suit now with its own regulatory framework, which is called Bill C-15. A lot of financial institutions that are operating in Canada are also operating in the US, and they're investing in digital asset strategies on both sides of the border.

Ellie Duncan

Yeah, and we heard actually at Open Banking Expo Canada from Rod Morrow at the Bank of Canada about, you know, the plans for stablecoins. And he also talked about, you know, the timing given the GENIUS Act being rolled out last year in the US. So, it's obviously, you know, key to Canada's financial security. What early use cases do you think will be rolled out, Reuben?

Reuben Piryatinsky

We're already seeing a lot of use cases around the world for stablecoins. On the B2B side and B2C, we have cross-border payments, payouts, and pay-ins. So, the gig economy has really exploded and expanded over the past several years, and we see platforms like Deel, which is a global workforce management platform, already offering payouts in stablecoins. I expect that to be more and more prevalent in future years, and others will follow suit.

Another one is treasury management and access to capital for businesses. So, we know that 66% of small businesses in North America have unstable cash flows. So, getting access and timely access to capital in multiple currencies, whichever they need to transact in, is of utmost importance. On the consumer side, we see currently growing adoption. For consumers in the US, we have 27% of US consumers that have purchased or used stablecoins. In Canada, it's only about 10%, but we do expect that to increase drastically, especially with stablecoins becoming a legitimate instrument for payments with regulation.

So, for consumers, we see agentic commerce as a big use case where agents are shopping for you, and you provide specific instructions and directions as to what can be purchased, types of merchants, and so on. Stablecoins have this programmability aspect, which lets you decide and dictate what the stablecoin can be used for and what it cannot be used for, as well as various conditions. Investing is another one. And sending money to family and friends abroad.

Ellie Duncan

Yeah, that would seem to be a really important use case, actually. It's certainly one that came up, I think, at our Expo. And, you know, as you rightly point out there, I guess once this is regulated, having a regulated stablecoin framework is probably going to help those adoption levels grow somewhat. So, so far we've talked about, you know, the real-time rail in Canada, and we've talked about stablecoins. Why have both? Is there a need for both of these payment types?

Reuben Piryatinsky

There are definitely two layers of the financial infrastructure. So, they have some overlap, and they also have differences and specific use cases that can be used for each one or that are more appropriate for each one. So, I'd like to make a distinction here in the way that payments are done through rails like real-time rails or RTP versus stablecoins.

With real-time rails, payments are done through a network, so there's an intermediary that provides the clearing and settlement component. And stablecoins are done between two parties directly—transactions are settled on the blockchain. This is an important distinction here because real-time rails are part of a payment infrastructure—there's an intermediary who can take on a portion of the risk. With stablecoins, the risk is completely on the party initiating the payment or accepting the payment.

So, now that we've made this distinction, let's look at the specific use cases. So, for real-time rails or real-time payments, domestic payments—that's the key use case. Domestic payments with high value. In Canada specifically, RTR is mandatory to receive, so receiving payments is mandatory for all financial institutions; send is optional. So, we will see some institutions adopting the send capability, others will be receive-only, and that's going to be—everyone is going to be on the real-time rail one way or another. Stablecoins might not be available immediately. So, RTR is becoming the de facto, or going to become the de facto standard for large value payments. In the US, for example, real-time payments are used already by 42% of US companies. I expect that number to grow.

So, for stablecoins, as I mentioned, they are for both domestic transactions and international transactions. They support multiple currencies. They are programmable, so they can be—we can decide what they're used for, how they're used, under what conditions transactions clear. And another important distinction here is that, which I've mentioned earlier, is that we're seeing the rise of agentic commerce. So, AI agents beginning to transact on a customer's behalf. And those agents do not have physical human identity, they are not able to go through identity verification, they're not able to go through live person verification—things that we're used to for authorizing human transactions. So, also on the flip side, agents can sometimes make mistakes and go rogue, and having stablecoins, having programmability within those stablecoins gives us the ability to, A, create extra safeguards for things that the agent can or cannot do on our behalf. They also can be used for provisioning specific agents to transact with a specific stablecoin.

Ellie Duncan

Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think, I mean, that I guess is why countries are investing in both stablecoins and real-time payment infrastructure, right? Because there is that distinction, there are some different use cases that they serve.

Reuben Piryatinsky

That's correct. There are two distinct networks or distinct parts of the financial infrastructure.

Ellie Duncan

Well, as I mentioned in my introduction, you spoke at Open Banking Expo Canada earlier this year. You moderated a panel, in fact. And on that panel, you talked about how real-time settlement changes the risk landscape, given that the window to detect fraudulent activity is reduced to seconds. So, can you expand on that point more and what that means, actually, for liability and dispute management?

Reuben Piryatinsky

Absolutely. Well, with traditional methods of money transfer, settlement happens in hours or even days. And so, there's more time there to run fraud checks, risk controls can be run not in real-time, and there's more time to react and reverse transactions if that's necessary. Also, payment systems like card networks, they have chargeback mechanisms. So, this ability to reverse transactions is built into the payment method.

With real-time payments, transactions are settled once they're cleared, so and they're settled in seconds. And therefore, fraud checks must be run in real-time before the transaction occurs. That also means that organizations need to change their fraud detection practices from being reactive to proactive. And we see some organizations actually adding additional fraud checks on top of the existing fraud detection methods that are within the RTR.

Now, this real-time settlement also creates a liability component. So, if you think of legacy systems, there was an assumption that transactions can be reversed after you detect fraud, so the question there is who's going to pay to unwind the transaction. Now, with real-time rails, that question of who pays for a bad transaction when it can't be unwound. And if we add stablecoins into the mix, as I mentioned previously, stablecoins have no intermediary which can absorb part of that liability. Transactions are done on-chain, they're cleared, they're settled, and so the real-time intelligence becomes even more important.

Ellie Duncan

Yeah, absolutely. That's really fascinating as well. And, you know, this discussion around liability and dispute management was definitely one that we heard quite a lot across the Expo. You know, we talked about it a lot in the UK with our payments system, and I think, you know, it's vital that we have accountability and so on if we're going to tackle fraudulent activity.

Well, look, I wanted to talk more, a bit more broadly now. How does the convergence of, you know, we've got open banking, stablecoins, real-time rails in Canada and, you know, real-time rail or FedNow in the US—how does the convergence of all three of these have the potential to transform North America's financial ecosystem, do you think?

Reuben Piryatinsky

They're hugely important. And having both the open banking component in terms of data as well as the payment component is crucial to having a more efficient financial system. What I mean by that is with open banking, open banking allows, open banking, open finance allow for standardized and reliable financial data exchange between ecosystem participants. And data is critical to anything we do in financial services, whether it's financial planning, loan adjudication, investing, accounting reconciliation—we need data. That's at the core of it.

And getting this read access to data is an essential first step. But without the ability to move money and make changes to the accounts, which is write access in open banking terms, we can't fully realize all of the benefits. So, for example, if we think of business loan approval, a business loan might be approved immediately through data, through cash flow data that's obtained through open banking, but if it takes two to three days to receive the funds, there is a missed opportunity there for the business. And so, having this real-time rail and payment infrastructure that enables real-time transactions is essential for us to realize the full benefit of open banking, where the rails are real-time rails through a network or stablecoins.

Now, on top of all that, we talked about security, and open banking provides an additional layer of security where you get verifiable data directly from the source, directly from the financial institution. You get the account holder information, you get confirmation of payee information and reliable transaction data. That helps reduce discrepancies, it helps reduce fraud, and it is absolutely essential.

Ellie Duncan

And of course, we must talk about the consumer in all of this, the beneficiaries of all of these financial services innovations. So, what do Americans and Canadians stand to gain then from innovations like RTR, open banking, and stablecoins?

Reuben Piryatinsky

First of all, we stand to gain access to better financial products that are more personalized to us, that are served to us at the time when we need them. We stand to gain financial products that are being embedded at the point of transaction, so embedded finance, whether it is at a point of sale, at a physical location, or it is online. We get to also benefit from the ability to shop better online, so agentic commerce is becoming huge.

So, we have the Universal Commerce Protocol that was just announced by Google and Shopify, which creates this additional standardized layer for online commerce. Google just announced at Google I/O a couple of weeks ago the unified shopping cart, where a shopping cart can be used to shop and buy products from multiple merchants, where now the paradigm is not going to different stores to buy products, but it is now essentially becoming a marketplace of different vendors and stores.

So, we're going to get a lot of this destruction and a lot of this efficiency and ability to get exactly what we need much more efficiently, much more in a much more personalized way, and to be able to transact with each other, to be able to get paid faster, and be able to send money a lot more quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost.

Ellie Duncan

Yeah, it really is a new era of payments, I think, that all of these technologies are heralding in. So, at Altitude then, how are you helping organizations to actually take advantage of these innovations? Because there's so much going on, competing for organizations' attention, and time, and resources, and investment, of course. So, yeah, how are you helping them?

Reuben Piryatinsky

We help financial institutions envision their future. We work with the C-suite to define where they want to operate, how their business model will change, and we drive the implementation of that vision with the team. So, we help build new products, we help launch and monetize products, and put in place the building blocks that are required, whether it is open banking capabilities, real-time rails to both be able to receive and send funds, stablecoins, and tokenized deposits, from the strategy of what this means for their organization to all the way to production.

And we take a cross-organizational view. So, our transformations are never done in silos. We always support a cohesive product vision, which means that we're supporting multiple parts of the organization in anything that we build and any of our recommendations. And we finally leave the organization with trained employees who can run the products and technology that we help the organizations build.

Ellie Duncan

Great. Well, Reuben, it sounds like you have your work cut out. There's so much going on at the moment across North America when it comes to payments and open banking, of course. So, how can people find you then, Reuben, and also find out more about Altitude Consulting? Tell us how to get in touch.

Reuben Piryatinsky

You're welcome to visit our website to learn more, achievealtitude.com, and I also invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn. I often post thought leadership and relevant industry news there, so please connect and reach out.

Ellie Duncan

Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure our listeners will be able to find you on LinkedIn, no problem. Great to have you on the podcast, Reuben. Thank you so much.

Reuben Piryatinsky

Thank you very much, Ellie.

Ellie Duncan

My thanks again there to Reuben Piryatinsky from Altitude Consulting for joining me on the podcast to talk us through some of those new developments and innovations that are going on in payments. There's a lot to navigate at the moment, and it's really fascinating to hear him boil it down to really what matters, how it all works, you know, how they converge, but also the distinctions between stablecoins and real-time payments. So, we'll be keeping a close eye on developments across North America, of course. Until next time, goodbye for now.