This is the second time Payments Canada has delayed the system’s launch, as it was first announced to be delivered in 2022, and then rescheduled the launch to mid-2023. No revised timeline was given by Payments Canada as part of its most recent delay announcement. Black said that Payments Canada’s members, stakeholders, and the broader payment industry would need to be consulted first, according to betakit.com.
As detailed by Tracey Black, President and CEO of Payments Canada has explained that although solution delivery is delayed, activities in other workstreams, including the delivery of the legal framework, are continuing.
Lynx is the Canadian electronic wire system that facilitates the irrevocable transfer of payments in Canadian dollars and is owned and operated by Payments Canada, Lynx began operations on 30 August 2021, replacing the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS), which had been in operation since February 1999.
Lynx is a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system in which settlement occurs immediately after the clearing of each individual payment, resulting in the instant transfer of funds in central bank money from one participant to another. Once settled, a payment is final and irrevocable. Lynx provides a means for settling obligations between participants in the system, while also helping the Bank of Canada reinforce the policy interest rate by managing the amount of liquidity in the financial system.
Lynx Release Two will introduce the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard to the Lynx system. At the end of August 2022 the Canadian regulator completed industry testing, a collaborative effort with involvement from Nexi, IBM, the Bank of Canada, Payments Canada, Lynx participants, and the vendor community. The collaboration completed over 7,000 test cases to ensure the system is ready to go live in November 2022. With the completion of industry testing, the focus has shifted toward implementation readiness. In less than 50 days, Canada’s payment system will be ISO 20022-enabled, Black reassured audiences.
Beginning at 08:44 UTC on 8 July 2022, Rogers Communications, one of the largest Internet service providers in Canada, experienced an outage that rendered its network unavailable over the course of approximately 24 hours. According to information released by the internet company 2.92 million wireline and 10.242 million wireless customers were impacted. While it determined that it did not breach service level agreements (SLA) with its retail customers, Rogers is assessing if it breached SLA with its vendors.
Apart from the multiple sectors of society where the lack of internet for Rogers customers made an impact (from health services to the judicial system, transportation to the general public), the Toronto Star cited that Interac reported on the morning of the outage that its services were affected by the Rogers outage. Interac Debit was temporarily unavailable online and at checkout, while Interac e-Transfer was also affected.
In her official statement announcing the delayed release of the RTR system, the Payments Canada CEO has stated that the Rogers outage on July 8 impacted consumers and businesses across Canada. I am proud to share that Lynx, Canada’s payment system, and the Automated Clearing Settlement System (ACSS) remained fully operational and there was no degradation in production. This unexpected outage demonstrated the resilience and reliability of Canada’s core payment infrastructure, as the head of Payments Canada reinforced.
Throughout the third quarter of 2022, the ACSS reportedly cleared and settled 2.3 billion payments valued at USD 2.2 trillion, and Lynx cleared and settled 3.1 million payments valued at USD 25.9 trillion, according to information put forth by Payments Canada in an official statement. In its first year of operations, Lynx cleared and settled 12 million payments valued at USD 115 trillion.
Payments Canada called the RTR a fundamental part of its multi-year industry programme to modernisee the infrastructure, rules, and standards that underpin payments in Canada.
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