Startups, banks and regulators contend with stressed customers, stalled stablecoin, and accelerated threat timelines.
The Canada Fintech Forum has always signalled where the industry is headed, but this year, it felt like a tactical briefing on how it will all actually work.
Last month in Montréal, panels described the fundamentals of Canada’s next financial era: real-time rails, tokenized money, AI in every corner, and a growing interlock between incumbents and startups learning to move together.
Speakers described an industry stepping into its operational phase, and the conversations centred on the infrastructure that keeps modern finance running through every hour of the day.
Here are five signals from the Canada Fintech Forum on where the industry is headed next.
Consumers are stress-testing FinTech products
In conversation with Mastercard’s Balinder Ahluwalia, Senior Vice President and Group Head of Market Development and Digital Partnerships in Canada, KOHO CEO Daniel Eberhard said that consumers dealing with a stressful economic landscape are paying much closer attention to where their money goes.
When people feel pressure, Eberhard said, they start questioning products that don’t deliver visible value. That means FinTech companies need to prove their models in real time.
KOHO’s own lending strategy, with 30 to 90-day loan terms, reflects a growing pressure to catch losses quickly and adjust before they compound. Across the sector, FinTech companies are being pushed toward operational discipline, with short feedback loops, transparent pricing, and sustainable unit economics.
Canada’s stablecoin gap is becoming a competitive risk
Panellists highlighted that Canada’s regulatory framework for tokenized money remains unfinished, which is creating a competitive disadvantage. USD-denominated stablecoins already move billions in daily transactions, but Canada has yet to set clear rules for issuance, reserves, and redemption in Canadian dollars.
Without these standards, foreign issuers will control the digital rails Canadians use to transact.
Speakers urged Canadian regulators to move quickly, citing US legislation as a workable model. The question panellists flagged was how soon Canada can deliver a standard that keeps pace with global markets.
Banks and startups are learning to move in sync
A structural shift was clearly signalled across multiple sessions, suggesting a new phase of practical collaboration in Canada’s FinTech ecosystem.
Startups that are built outside the banking perimeter are learning that regulatory trust and scale require partnership. And banks, which were once determined to own every layer of innovation, are opening their systems to FinTech companies that can move faster and experiment safely inside compliance boundaries.
That dynamic is extending beyond traditional banking, as Mastercard’s Ahluwalia explored in another conversation with Affirm COO, Michael Linford. Affirm offers consumers flexible options that enable them to pay-over-time without any late or hidden fees, making real-time credit decisions for every individual transaction.
By collaborating with traditional “networks, acquirers, and partner banks,” Linford noted, Affirm is making its transparent credit products more widely available—and helping financial institutions meet the growing demand for these payment methods.
While Mastercard and Affirm aren’t partnered, Linford’s remarks reflect a broader payments landscape where the networks, such as Mastercard, play a foundational role in connecting banks, acquirers, and FinTechs through shared infrastructure that enables new credit models to scale.
AI is collapsing the financial fraud timeline
When threat actors penetrate a financial system, they previously laid dormant for an average of nine days before making their next move. The Forum’s cybersecurity panel reported that the timeline has dropped to just 51 minutes.
Pauses that once gave defenders a chance to react have been removed by automation, and malicious systems can now map networks, harvest credentials, and escalate privileges almost immediately.
Human monitoring cannot keep pace with the scale and aggression of cyber attacks, and financial institutions have been forced to automate detection as aggressively as attackers automate exploitation. AI is turning security into a symmetrical contest with two learning systems racing inside the same networks
In response, panellists noted that all players in the FinTech community should invest in AI and cyber solutions to strengthen intelligence, security, and personalization across commerce.
While not on the cybersecurity panel, Mastercard is embracing AI to fight AI-based fraud and cybercrime, investing approximately $11 billion USD in cybersecurity innovation since 2018. This investment is focused on bolstering cybersecurity, anti-fraud, and AI capabilities, helping players big and small from across the ecosystem enhance operational resilience.
Real-time rail will demand a culture shift at banks
Canada’s real-time rail will mark the country’s first move toward always-on payments infrastructure. For decades, settlement occurred in batches, buffered by overnight processing and business-hour overside. RTR replaces that rhythm with perpetual motion.
In this context, panellists also highlighted that banks will need teams capable of monitoring, repairing, and reconciling transactions around the clock. The banks that treat RTR as an operational transformation will be the ones prepared to run at the pace of a 24-hour economy.
The conversations at the Canada Fintech Forum didn’t stop there. The program also dug into platformization, borderless payments, talent, and other forces reshaping finance in Canada. Catch the complete sessions from Finance Montréal here.
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Feature image by Éric Carrière.