Build for Canada’s Digital Money Rails: A Session for Product and Payments Leaders
What’s worth building as stablecoins and tokenized deposits arrive, and where the rules still aren’t settled.
Canada still runs most of its payments on rails built in the 1980s. Money crossing borders routes through correspondent banks and waits for business hours. That’s starting to shift. Money is beginning to move on programmable, round-the-clock rails, through stablecoins and through tokenized deposits, and that opens up things that weren’t buildable a year ago: cross-border settlement at any hour, real-time treasury transfers between business units, programmable marketplace payouts, direct settlement between fintech partners.
Which path fits depends on who you are. A bank’s route looks different from a fintech’s, and a stablecoin and a tokenized deposit are not the same product or the same regulatory animal. That’s part of what makes this moment worth getting right.
Because the rules aren’t finished. Whether a stablecoin is a payment instrument or something else, who can issue these products versus who can only build on top of them, how yield and custody get treated: all of that is still open, and it shapes what you can build. The framework is coming. It isn’t here yet.
So we’re bringing together senior product, payments, and partnerships leaders from Canadian banking and fintech to work through where these rails fit, what’s worth building today, and which pieces are still waiting on the rules. You leave knowing where the lines actually sit.
Panelists
Didier Lavallée — Founder & CEO, Tetra Digital Group. The team behind CADD, Canada's first CAD-backed stablecoin issued by a regulated financial institution, backed by ATB Financial, National Bank, Shopify, and Wealthsimple.
Shiv Ganeshan — Senior Director, North American Real-Time Payments & Open Banking, Visa. Builds the products carrying money across the rails the rest of us plug into.
Paul Shin — Enterprise Strategy and Transformation, RBC. The view from inside a Tier-1 Canadian bank on where new rails fit on the strategic agenda.
Avinash Chidambaram — Co-Founder, Cybrid. Bringing stablecoin rails to fintechs and banks for faster, cheaper cross-border settlement.
Moderated by Morva Rohani, Founding Executive Director, Canadian Web3 Council — Canada's national industry association for Web3 policy and regulation.
Who it’s for
Heads of product, payments, and partnerships, and the operators around them, across Canadian banking, fintech, treasury, and financial infrastructure.
Format
9:00 to 9:30am: Doors, coffee, arrival
9:30 to 10:30am: Moderated discussion and audience Q&A
10:30 to 11:00am: Networking
Venue Note & Community Guidelines:
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