Instant – Finance News Today

Payments Canada launches long-delayed instant payments system

Finance News — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:15:15 +0000

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Payments Canada says it has launched its real-time rail national payment system, which is expected to speed day-to-day payments for Canadian businesses and consumers.

It says the new system is expected to enable participating members to exchange, clear and settle payments securely in real time.

“The launch of Canada’s real-time rail marks the beginning of a new era for payments in our country,” Payments Canada CEO Susan Hawkins said in a news release Monday.

“As a national asset that’s designed specifically for our country, the [real-time rail] gives the payment ecosystem a modern foundation to build on.”

The system is expected to generate savings from lower processing costs, reduced use of cash and cheques and a shorter period during which funds are temporarily unavailable to the recipient.

The initial participants include Wealthsimple, Questbank, Peoples Trust Co., Paramount Commerce, Koho, DoBusiness.com, Digital Commerce Bank and Bank of America. Additional participants are expected to be added in the coming months, including all of the major Canadian financial institutions.

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Transactions that pass through Payments Canada systems include debit card payments, pre-authorized debits, direct deposits, bill payments, wire payments and cheques.

Henry Kim, a professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business, said the announcement is a step in the right direction.

“There’s a thread that we have to do this for our sovereignty, and we just have to keep up with the rest of the world. A lot of the world has real-time settlement,” he said in an interview, adding it already exists in the U.S.

Payments Canada has been years behind schedule on getting real-time rail in place, which allows near-instant payments clearing 24 hours a day, along with other improvements. The organization originally aimed to have the system in place by 2019.

The ability to more rapidly clear payments is particularly helpful for businesses, Kim said

“It also means that if you’re tight for cash, if you’re a business and your working capital runs low, you can get paid much faster by other businesses,” he said.

Payments Canada said the real-time rail system will also come with mandatory centralized fraud services and controls, including confirmation of payee, a fraud transaction safety score, a list of fraud risks and a platform for fraud reporting.

Kim, who works with U.S. credit unions on payment technology, said…

OpenAI revamps shopping experience in ChatGPT after Instant Checkout

Finance News — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:15:18 +0000

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends an event to pitch AI for businesses in Tokyo, Feb. 3, 2025.

Kim Kyung-hoon | Reuters

OpenAI is rolling out a new shopping experience within ChatGPT to make it easier for users to find and compare products, after its Instant Checkout feature failed to take off.

The company said on Tuesday that shoppers will be able to find products they’re looking for by uploading images or describing items and including criteria like their budget, preferences and other constraints. ChatGPT will offer more visual results that people can use to compare different product offerings.

“Under the hood, we’ve improved speed, relevance and product coverage — so results are more up-to-date and more useful,” OpenAI said in a blog post.

The update comes after OpenAI pivoted away from Instant Checkout, which allowed users to purchase select items from retailers like Etsy, Walmart and Shopify directly within ChatGPT. OpenAI announced that feature last year and initially billed it as the “next step” in AI-enabled commerce.

Analysts previously told CNBC that OpenAI underestimated how difficult the enablement of transactions would be. It struggled to onboard merchants, show accurate data about products and introduce multi-item carts or connect loyalty memberships.

“We’ve found that the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide, so we’re allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while we focus our efforts on product discovery,” OpenAI said in the latest post.

OpenAI said merchants can now share their product feeds and promotions with the company, which means their products are “fully represented” within ChatGPT. Retailers like Target, Sephora and Nordstrom already support OpenAI’s new product discovery experience.

Merchants interested in deeper integrations can also continue to develop custom apps within ChatGPT, OpenAI said. The company introduced that functionality at its annual developer conference in October and began adding dedicated retail apps from Instacart, Target and others last year.

Triggering an app within the chatbot will help give those companies more control of the customer experience and the transaction process. Walmart introduced an in-app ChatGPT service on Tuesday that supports linking, loyalty and Walmart payments, OpenAI said.

Alongside OpenAI’s announcement, Shopify said Tuesday that it is “upgrading the shopping experience” in ChatGPT. It will enable Shopify merchants to connect their storefronts to its catalog, “then complete purchases via an in-app browser.”

Shopify is also rolling out a new service called Agentic Plan that lets merchants who don’t have a storefront with the company surface their products via Shopify’s own tools in ChatGPT, Google Gemini and elsewhere.

— CNBC’s Annie Palmer contributed to this report

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