The Power of e-Transfer
Article #60 : Why Canada's most underrated B2B payment tool is about to get even more powerful
TLDR
Interac e-Transfer moved $554 billion across 1.4 billion transactions in 2024, with 20%+ now involving a business and Business Request Money — the digital invoicing function — growing 81% year-over-year in fiscal 2025.
Canadian businesses are using e-Transfer for real-time claim payouts, gig pay, supplier batches, rent collection, and invoicing — at scale, with ISO 20022-style remittance data and bulk files of up to 10,000 transactions.
Canada still processes 278.9 million cheques a year. Interac estimates the Business e-Transfer product alone can displace ~200 million of them.
The Real-Time Rail launching in 2026 isn’t a competitor — it’s an amplifier. RTR will clear and settle Interac e-Transfer transactions, and it raises the per-transaction ceiling from $25,000 to $100,000, opening the rail to use cases that today route to wires or EFT.
The B2B rail hiding in plain sight
For most Canadian fintech operators, Interac e-Transfer is the rail you grew up with — the consumer service Canadians use to split dinner bills and send rent to a landlord. Familiar, useful, not particularly interesting from a B2B product perspective.
That framing is now wrong. e-Transfer moved $554 billion across 1.4 billion transactions in 2024. Over 20% involved a business as sender or receiver. Statistics Canada reports that 50% of Canadian businesses now accept e-Transfer — on par with credit card acceptance. Forty-seven percent of users have used the service to pay a small business.
The most telling number is Business Request Money. It lets a company send a customer a payment request through the e-Transfer rail — effectively a digital invoice with the invoice number, PO, and due date attached — and it grew 81% year-over-year in Interac’s fiscal 2025. That isn’t consumer drift into business use. That’s businesses actively replacing emailed PDF invoices and cheque-by-mail with something their accounting system can read.
The Business variant is a different product
Most builders treat e-Transfer as a single product. It isn’t. The Business variant is a materially different instrument from the consumer rail.
Per-transaction limits move from $3,000–$10,000 (consumer, varies by FI) to $25,000. Bulk files support up to 10,000 transactions per submission. Remittance data moves from a free-text memo field to ISO 20022-style structured fields — invoice numbers, purchase orders, due dates, contract references — that flow directly into ERP and accounting systems. Routing extends beyond email and phone to include account number routing for high-volume inbound. There are no submission cut-off times.
Four core capabilities matter for product builders: Bulk Payables (sending to many recipients in one file), Bulk Receivables (collecting at scale with reconciliation data attached), Business Request Money (programmable invoicing), and Autodeposit with name verification (frictionless, fraud-resistant inbound).
Map those to use cases and the addressable surface clarifies fast: real-time insurance claim payouts, gig pay-on-completion, lender disbursement, property management rent collection, marketplace vendor payouts, professional services AR. Wherever a Canadian business currently writes a cheque, sends an EFT for an under-$25K invoice, or maintains a manual reconciliation process, e-Transfer for Business is the displacement.
The cheque-killer corridor
Canada processed 278.9 million cheques in 2024. Interac estimates the Business e-Transfer product alone can displace ~200 million of them.
The cheques live in predictable verticals. Construction businesses still accept cheques at 91.9%, manufacturing at 88%, wholesale trade at 86.3%. These are AP- and AR-heavy industries where cheques persist not because they’re better but because the alternatives haven’t been operationally easy enough.
The cheque-cost stack — printing, mailing, reconciliation, NSF risk, fraud loss — runs $4–$20 per cheque on a fully-loaded basis. e-Transfer business pricing varies by FI but sits well below the cheque stack at any reasonable volume. The November 2025 wholesale flat-fee transition ($0.08 inter-institution / $0.04 on-us) further levels the underlying economics for smaller FIs and credit unions. For AR specifically, Interac’s Real-Time Request to Pay fee is $0.35 flat or 35 bps capped at $3.50 — favourable economics for an invoice replacement product compared to a 1.5–3% card processing fee.
The regulatory unlock
September 2025 changed the access model for fintech operators.
The Retail Payment Activities Act came into force on September 8, requiring every PSP operating in Canada to register with the Bank of Canada. By month-end, more than 1,500 PSPs were under supervision — including Wealthsimple, Koho, Brim Financial, Venn, Helcim, Trolley, ZayZoon, Zum Rails, and Shopify Payments. Eight days later, Interac announced that PSPs holding both RPAA and FINTRAC MSB registration could apply for direct participation in the e-Transfer service.
Pre-RPAA, fintechs had one realistic path: become a commercial customer of a sponsor bank or processor like VoPay, DCPayments, or Paysafe. Post-RPAA, there are three — direct Participant, indirect via a Connection Service Provider, or commercial customer of an existing Participant. Neo Financial became the second fintech direct participant late last year. RPAA registration has become a market credential, not just a compliance line item.
RTR is the amplifier, not the replacement
The widespread assumption among Canadian operators is that the Real-Time Rail will eventually displace e-Transfer. The opposite is true. RTR will make e-Transfer more powerful in two specific ways.
First, RTR raises the ceiling. The per-transaction limit on e-Transfer for Business sits at $25,000 today. Per Payments Canada’s consultation document, RTR will set its per-transaction limit at $100,000 — a 4x lift. That single change brings a much wider range of B2B use cases onto the rail: larger supplier payments, equipment purchases, real estate-related disbursements, mid-sized commercial settlements that today route to wires or EFT.
Second, RTR strengthens the rail underneath. RTR is designed to clear and settle Interac e-Transfer transactions — Central 1 has stated explicitly that it and most other Canadian FIs will connect to RTR through the e-Transfer rail. The user-facing experience that 82% of Canadian adults already know — Autodeposit, Request Money, email-as-routing — stays the same. RTR provides instant 24/7/365 final settlement underneath, ISO 20022-native messaging, and centralised fraud analytics including a Confirmation of Payee service that verifies payee name against account before submission. This is closer to India’s UPI-on-IMPS evolution than to a card-network replacement.
The implication for product builders is more nuanced than “build once, run forever.” The customer experience and conceptual integration model carry forward, but the underlying technical connection will change. Interac e-Transfer is migrating from its legacy XML/SOAP API to an ISO 20022-native message format through 2026 and 2027, and per Central 1’s RTR guidance, the current legacy connection will be sunset. A new technical integration will be required — but operators integrating today are not building throwaway work. The product surfaces are durable. The team that ships a clean e-Transfer integration in 2026 will be far better positioned for the RTR-uplifted version than the team waiting on the sidelines.
What good looks like
Four things a fintech operator building on e-Transfer in 2026 should be doing.
Default new B2B counterparties to Autodeposit. It’s more secure than the security-question flow (it bypasses the email step, the most common interception vector) and provides legal-name verification on the sender side. Most B2B fraud on this rail is social engineering, not network compromise.
Treat Business Request Money as a product surface, not a feature. Invoice replacement is the highest-growth use case on the network. Build it into AR workflows with the invoice number, PO, and due date attached, plus automated reminders and a clean path back into the customer’s accounting system.
Underwrite the path-to-direct-participation question early. If payments are core to the product and volume is heading north of $50M annually, RPAA registration plus a direct-participant trajectory is a real strategic option. If payments are adjacent, an aggregator is the right answer.
Build for what e-Transfer becomes after RTR. The $25K ceiling is going to lift. Plan AR and AP product surfaces that work at $25K today and $100K tomorrow. The technical integration will need updating when ISO 20022 lands, but the user flows, reconciliation logic, and counterparty patterns you build now are the foundation for what comes next.
The power of e-Transfer is that it was already the rail. RTR just makes it more useful — for more businesses, at higher transaction values, with stronger fraud controls and instant final settlement. That’s the rail to build on.
Sources
Interac Corp., Corporate Year in Review FY2025
Interac Corp., Understanding Fees
Interac Corp., e-Transfer for Business overview
Interac Corp., Broadening access to e-Transfer for PSPs
Statistics Canada, Payment methods accepted by businesses
Payments Canada, RTR Consultation Document
Payments Canada, The Real-Time Rail: Where are we now?
Central 1, Understanding the RTR
Central 1, Preparing for the RTR
McCarthy Tétrault, Payments Canada Consultation on RTR Bylaws
Competition Bureau Canada, Monitoring Interac’s e-transfer pricing
PNC Insights, Ten Things About Payments in Canada
Digital Transactions, Interac Hits 1 Billion Payments
stripe and ten31 hit similar themes recently, e-transfer being the sleeper rail makes a lot of sense