You are currently viewing Laurence Cooke introduces the Paytechs of Canada

Laurence Cooke introduces the Paytechs of Canada

Laurence: The last thing I wanted to talk about was Paytechs of Canada. So we formed Paytechs of Canada and we’re encouraging anyone that’s in payments and technology to join Paytechs. Just to be clear, this is not excluding banks. We already have two bank founders, so it’s for banks and for FinTechs. It’s for anyone that is in Paytech. We are encouraging everyone to join so that we can have a debate and get some data on what we need to do to move this country forward.

Laurence: It’s imperative that we do some things and we do them quickly so we don’t have outsiders come in and eat our lunch because we’re dragging our feet in our country. We’ve got to move forward and we got to move forward fast and the key things we need to focus on are payment modernization, access for non-FI’s, open banking, payment initiation. I really loved Senator Deacon’s description of open banking and rather than saying open banking, he said, “Consumer-directed banking.” And I think that is a much better way of describing it. So I’m hoping to try and steal his thought process there and use consumer-directed banking because it implies something completely different because at the heart of open banking, all we want as consumers and businesses to own their own data and be able to decide what they want to do with their data. This is not about saying banks are bad. And in fact, I think it is good for banks and banks that embrace open banking, I think will grow and thrive and those that don’t will wither and struggle.

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