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.

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johnwalkr an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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).

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xattt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How comfortable are you going to be requesting a payment from someone by asking them to rail you?

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voidmain0001 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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...

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stackghost 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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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mikepurvis an hour ago | parent [-]

As a historical note, "e-transfer" is actually the third major branding of the service.

Acxsys [1] was launched by the Canadian banks in 1996 as a for-profit startup meant to develop online payment solutions, and they original launched the service as "certapay".

Acxsys was folded into Interac in 2018, but I think it was somewhat prior to that the certapay name was discontinued in favour of "email money transfer". Everyone called them e-transfers though, and so eventually Interac gave up on EMT and just went with that name, which is what it is now: https://www.interac.ca/en/resources/personal-resources/perso...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac#History

	▲	xattt 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		E-transfers sucked for the first decade because there was a several dollar fee associated with them, making them impractical for small amounts. I’m miserly so I low-key dreaded ordering takeout with other staff on night shifts, and having to pay the fee to square up with the person who ordered. As an aside, there was an e-purse pilot sometime between 1996-1998 in Southern Ontario. It may have been Visa or MC driven rather than Interact/Acxsys. I remember seeing a booth at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1996 where they demoed a smart card that could be used for web transactions (!) using a floppy drive adaptor (!!). 1990s fintech was wild.

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Obscurity4340 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Its already growing on me

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dleslie an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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?"