TORONTO - Interac Corp. says it has launched a new offering that gives Canadians more ways to pay for online purchases including directly through their bank account.
The company says the Konek payment solution is gradually being rolled out with Staples.ca as its first client, while for customers, access is limited for now to those who bank at BMO, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank or TD Canada Trust.
The option allows shoppers to pay through their debit or credit cards, or directly from their chequing, savings or line of credit accounts.
Purchases through bank accounts or a line of credit are being done through Interac Direct, which it says is a new digital payments solution with lower merchant fees.
Interac says it created the option in collaboration with Canadian financial institutions to offer more choices in how people pay online, while also lowering cart abandonment.
Kris Zanuldin, head of Konek, says in a statement that it offers a secure, homegrown alternative to international e-commerce payment solutions.
Meh. While Interac bringing forward a more ‘universal’ online payment option is great, almost all banks / financial institutions have a US hosted backend that obliterates any privacy and continues to fund and be reliant on US / Foreign interests.
Our govt has officially come out with a whitepaper saying the obvious – that unless you control your tech stack, there’s not much stopping the US from accessing/taking anything that’s in a US cloud. Banks are definitely in US clouds – hell, there’s only like ONE viable Canadian backend banking system provider in the country that I’m aware of, and it’s only used by a handful of tiny FIs. And it’s not enough of a selling feature to help those small CUs out it seems. And even with that, they’d still need to route payments through US cloud systems – like a bunch of the cheque clearing / processing is done in Microsoft’s cloud now, for example. That got moved into a US tech giant for a chunk of the sector this year.