Canadian payments processor Moneris, co-owned by banks RBC and BMO, announced its sale to a US private equity firm this week. If the $2-billion CAD deal is closed and approved, roughly one in three Canadian payments will run through a US-controlled entity.<\/p>\n
Payment processing is an invisible but critical piece of economic infrastructure. With Moneris gone, Canada\u2019s Big Five banks will soon mainly rely on US providers. As Vass Bednar of the Canadian Shield Institute pointed out, that means a foreign player will have \u201ceffective control over how the country\u2019s commerce clears.\u201d<\/p>\n
Domestic tech solutions could help. Calgary\u2019s Helcim is positioning itself to fill the vacuum left by Moneris. Its CEO, Nicolas Beique, told BetaKit that Helcim has seen a 30-percent jump in inbound calls this week from Canadian leads who want to support Canadian companies. Meanwhile, some have questioned whether Moneris itself is a valuable enough asset to worry about; a single payment processor isn\u2019t necessarily as critical to sovereignty as the rails those payments run on.<\/p>\n
But real-time rails aren\u2019t here yet, and Moneris\u2019s new ownership still creates a vulnerability. The long-awaited instant payment settlement is still on the way. It\u2019s supposed to finally roll out in Q4 of this year, bringing faster and cheaper payments.<\/p>\n
If nothing else, the Moneris sale could be a wake-up call for Canada to create the thriving payment ecosystem it has promised companies and consumers. A first step would be finally delivering sovereign payment rails and ensuring they can\u2019t be bought.<\/p>\n
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Despite constant compliments on his glowing complexion, PhD biochemist Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric St-Denis-Bissonnette\u2019s passion isn\u2019t for skincare. But the founder and CEO of Ottawa-based BioThera Solutions says he has developed a skincare serum that could act as a foothold into \u201cthe future for medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kitchener-Waterloo-based Convictional has decided to permanently shut down after a \u201cHail Mary\u201d pivot from e-commerce to an AI-native Slack alternative didn\u2019t pan out. The co-founder and CEO walks through what went wrong, and what happens now.<\/p>\n
A new study from the Council of Canadian Innovators has found the four main barriers that cause Canadian tech companies to exit to international buyers \u201cat precisely the moment when scaling becomes more complex and capital-intensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Researchers from the University of Calgary, University of Alberta, and Queen\u2019s University are studying the millions of tiny organisms that live within the wildfire smoke that has become increasingly prevalent in Canadian life.<\/p>\n