After nearly a decade of consultation, Canada is finally building. Consumer-Driven Banking is live in legislation, the Bank of Canada has its mandate, and the 2026/2027 milestones are real. The question is no longer whether Canada will have an open finance framework – it's whether the execution will match the ambition.
At Open Banking Expo Canada, Invela's Jim Wadsworth chaired the debate on Consumer-Driven Banking with Eyal Sivan, GM NAM, Ozone; Adriana Vega, CEO, Fintechs Canada; Abraham Tachjian, Chief Regulatory Affairs Officer, Brim Financial and Heather Davis, Senior Director Innovation, CIBC.
Here are eight things that stood out.
Most jurisdictions came to open banking as a disciplinary tool – a regulatory stick to beat incumbents who'd had it too good for too long. Canada chose differently. From the very first 2017 Department of Finance consultations, the design intent was consumer welfare and data rights, not market correction. That choice shows up everywhere: in reciprocal data rights, in the push for genuine network effects rather than a gated club, in the insistence on privacy anchored to existing frameworks rather than a parallel regime.
Everyone agrees on the destination. The hard part is the machinery that gets there without destroying trust. Two themes dominated: accreditation that actually scales, and third-party risk management (TPRM) as a first-order problem. If you want network effects, you can't build a system where only a handful of players can realistically participate. TPRM can't be an afterthought.
Millions of Canadians have been using screen-scraping-based services for years. Data sharing isn't a foreign concept. Consumers don't care about the label. They want better mortgage rates, smarter cashflow tools, fairer credit decisions. But they do need to understand what they're consenting to, how their data will be used, and how to revoke that consent.
If there's a failure in the ecosystem – a bad actor, a data breach, a payment gone wrong – who is on the hook? Clarity on liability, complaints handling, dispute management, and regulatory escalation paths is not back-office plumbing. It's the front line of trust, and a competitive differentiator for the whole ecosystem.
Unlike markets where instant payments and open banking arrived a decade apart, Canada is bringing Consumer-Driven Banking, the Real Time Rail, and stablecoin infrastructure on a broadly similar timetable. Real-time rails without strong access frameworks risk becoming real-time fraud rails. Together, they unlock use cases no other jurisdiction has nailed yet.
The Bank of Canada will maintain a public registry of accredited participants. That gives consumers and businesses a basic trust anchor. But harder questions remain: how will incidents and enforcement actions be surfaced? Open finance isn't a one-and-done project.
After nearly a decade of consultation, there's a real risk that day one lands with a thud – not because it failed, but because phase one is, by design, a first step. This is a multi-year build, not a press release moment.
The narrative is clear. The pitfalls in other markets are well understood. The generational opportunity is real. What remains is the work: standards, accreditation, TPRM, monitoring, liability frameworks, and real-time rails that don't just move money faster, but move trust and confidence faster too.
The question is no longer whether Canada will have an open finance framework. It's whether the execution matches the ambition.
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