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As a Canadian, I like this. It really sounds like they're taking Interac's proprietary e-Transfer system and rolling it out as a public good for any bank to build on. That's pretty cool. It also seems smart to have involved Interac as partner, instead of trying to build around them.

Like all things from any government -- let's see how the rollout goes. But I am cautiously happy to hear about this.

I like this too. It’s worth noting that interact debit has been around in Canada forever (got my first card in the 90s), etransfer (using just an email address) for a long time and in general Canadian banks have been great at working with each other and abroad. And there was never a ton of private apps you had to rely on.

Both places are better now but I remember being in the US in the 2010s and having an easier time using my bank card to get cash than an American far away from their credit union. In Japan in 2012 I also sometimes used my Canadian bank card when my Japanese bank was closed for a holiday (this was fixed in 2015).

E-transfer is not a real time payment system. The recipient's financial institution lends the money to them and then the actual funds (which were frozen by your bank to ensure money is available) gets transferred asynchronously over a period of a few days, as with any legacy bank transfer. It's just hidden away from the end-users.
This is how all real time payment systems work if the recipient institution != sender institution. Credit cards, iDeal, Bancontact, SEPA instant... In the end it's reconciled within the next few days with a pinky promise between institutions the money will actually arrive.
> Like all things from any government

Like all things... human???

{"deleted":true,"id":50434969,"parent":50434551,"time":1794274551,"type":"comment"}
How comfortable are you going to be requesting a payment from someone by asking them to rail you?

/s

Its already growing on me
I'm very comfortable. Interac purchased and enhanced the SecureKey Verify.Me service and rebranded it as Interac Identity. It's a reliable way of determining identity and eliminating fraud (I helped integrate it into a company's customer sale process which was rife with fraud). This page on the Real-Time Rail shows that it's definitely using Interac e-Transfer https://www.payments.ca/systems-services/payment-systems/rea...
Whoosh?

"To rail someone" means to have vigorous sex with someone. I believe the poster to whom you replied was making a joke about the name being unfortunate.

Naming is hugely important. I'm always catching downvotes on here for complaining about otherwise-decent open source projects that will never gain traction because they have moronic names like Xonaly or whatever. But I suspect "hey can you rail me 20 bucks" won't be how it gets referred to, and "I don't have cash, does e-transfer work?" will continue to be how it's referred to.

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We Canadians love our sexual innuendos in language. Asking someone to rail us would fit in nicely: "I'm fucking the dog, can ya rail me enough for a forty?"
Yeah the day I learned (the hard way) that Americans don’t have “fucking the dog” as an idiom was quite the day