Lauren Langbridge is the general manager for North America for FinTech payment platform Wise.
Public data from Payments Canada shows that millions of Canadians send international payments each year, with outbound remittances and cross-border commercial activity steadily increasing year over year. Small and mid-sized businesses, in particular, are more globally connected than ever—paying suppliers abroad, managing distributed workforces and serving customers in multiple currencies.
Yet cross-border payments are often the most anxiety-inducing transactions customers make. They often come with hidden fees, uncertain delivery times, and are prone to delays or failure as money moves through multiple intermediaries.
For a country as globally connected as Canada, that friction is increasingly difficult to justify. In a world of real-time, seamless digital experiences, customers expect international payments to feel as quick and transparent as domestic ones. They want certainty on price, clarity on exchange rates, and confidence in delivery times. Inconvenient payment experiences that may once have been tolerated are now a catalyst for switching providers. In fact, Swift reports that 70 percent of loyal bank-using consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are now willing to switch payment providers over any friction, whether a hidden fee or unclear exchange rate.
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At the same time, Canada’s payments landscape is undergoing meaningful change. Regulatory modernization, including expanding eligibility of Payments Canada membership and broadened access to domestic payment rails for non-banks, is spurring competition and lowering barriers to innovation. As a result, consumers and businesses will have more choice in how, and with whom, they move money across borders.
In this environment of rising expectations and growing opportunity, banks and financial platforms that stand still on modernizing their cross-border capabilities risk losing customer relationships to more agile players. However, this isn’t an inevitable outcome. Partnerships offer an effective path for financial providers to retain customers—combining historic brands and scale with technology, speed and specialization.
Rising demand meets legacy infrastructure
The speed, cost and convenience challenges associated with cross-border payments are not limited to end customers—they also create significant operational friction for banks and financial providers.
According to MoneyCorp, one in five international payments require intervention—even those processed by top financial institutions. This means a bank may need to manually step in to route or verify a transaction before it can be completed. Many of these interventions are a result of the complexity of traditional correspondent banking networks, where payments pass through multiple intermediary banks that help route an international payment from sender to recipient. Correspondent banking infrastructure was built for a different era; every step adds cost and can trigger manual investigation or reconciliation to resolve what should be a routine transaction.
At the same time, international payments are an essential service—but often not a primary area of differentiation. Their competitive focus typically lies in customer relationships, lending, and broader financial services, making investments in global payments infrastructure seem ess critical.
Even for banks looking to enhance their global payments capabilities, building a more streamlined global payments infrastructure to better meet evolving customer expectations would be a significant undertaking.
It would require navigating regulatory obligations across jurisdictions, managing liquidity in multiple currencies, and establishing direct connections to local clearing systems to create a seamless customer experience.. For many institutions, this level of investment and specialization is difficult, if not impossible, to justify.
A proven alternative
Partnership models offer a proven alternative. By collaborating with specialized global payments providers, banks and FIs can enhance speed, transparency and coverage without having to rebuild their own core infrastructure. Partnerships can also reduce time to market, contain costs and offload the operational and liquidity complexity of managing payments across dozens of currencies and countries, allowing institutions to remain focused on their core services.
Improvements in speed and transparency often have measurable downstream impact. If a provider’s payment service isn’t instant, customers may be more likely to reach out to ask where their money is. In contrast, instant settlement and upfront pricing clarity can meaningfully reduce payment-related support queries and thereby lower the operational and cost burden associated with cross-border payments.
Partnerships also can align with regulatory direction. Recent federal policy discussions have emphasized transparency, competition, and consumer protection in financial services. By embedding pre-existing specialized solutions that offer speed, clarity and affordability in cross-border payments, financial institutions can meet these expectations proactively, rather than reactively.
A strategic choice
Cross-border payments are evolving fast in Canada, driven by customer behaviour, technology, and regulation. The relevant question for banks is how to respond, and how quickly, to keep pace with changing expectations and demand.
Ultimately, banks and financial institutions that invest in their global payments infrastructure will come out on top in an increasingly competitive financial services landscape.
By combining the scale of established banks, long trusted stewards of Canadians’ financial lives, with specialized global infrastructure, Canadian financial institutions can lead the next chapter of cross-border payments and deliver the seamless, reliable experiences customers now expect, but more importantly, deserve.
The opinions and analysis expressed in the above article are those of its author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of BetaKit or its editorial staff. It has been edited for clarity, length, and style.