Finance Minister launches open banking advisory committee
“The popularity of FinTech will continue to grow in the future, and Canada must keep pace in order to be competitive in the global market.”
That’s one of the key messages from the Competition Bureau which has published a progress report following a study it released last year on the rapidly changing world of technology-led innovation in the financial services sector.
Canada is currently lagging countries including the UK and Australia for FinTech development but the report says that opening up the payment infrastructure in the financial sector will help remove barriers to growth in Canadian FinTech.
Provincial regulators are also collaborating to ensure standard rules that will help the sector grow nationally and internationally.
Open banking
There is also work ongoing regarding open banking to empower Canadians to have access to their banking data.
This is an area that federal finance minister Bill Morneau is keen to investigate.
He launched an advisory committee Wednesday as the first step in a Government of Canada review of the potential merits of open banking, as announced in Budget 2018.
"As technology continues to drive change in the financial sector, we must ensure that the needs of consumers—for more affordable and convenient services—are considered alongside the needs of the financial institutions that serve them. I congratulate the members of the Advisory Committee on their appointments and look forward to the results of their consultations on open banking," said Mr Morneau.
The committee includes former TD Bank executive and CFO Colleen Johnston; entrepreneur and investor François Lafortune, former McKinsey & Company executive and currently CEO and founder of venture launchpad Diagram; Kirsten Thompson, partner at law firm Dentons Canada; and Ilse Treurnicht, most recently the Chief Executive Officer of the MaRS Discovery District, a leading innovation hub in Toronto.
