Industry and Technology

Opening remarks

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for the invitation to appear today. As Payments Canada's chief delivery officer, I lead large-scale delivery programs, including Canada's real-time rail and its central fraud services. I have over 35 years of experience in transforming financial technology and operations. Payments Canada owns and operates the critical national payments infrastructure—the systems, rules and standards that help keep Canada's economy moving. Established by the Canadian Payments Act, we are a national public-purpose organization that operates on a non-profit basis. Our board of directors is majority-independent, and the Minister of Finance is responsible for our enabling legislation. Our systems, which are overseen by the Bank of Canada, include Lynx, Canada's high-value payment system, used by participants to clear and settle primarily wire payments and large-value payments; the automated clearing settlement system, ACSS, which clears and settles retail batch payments, like direct deposits and debits; and Canada's forthcoming real-time rail, which I will speak to in a moment. In 2025, our system safely cleared and settled $103 trillion among institutions.…

Opening remarks

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation to appear today. I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinabe nation and recognize the enduring presence of first nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. My name is Chris Lynam. I am the director general of the national cybercrime coordination centre and the Canadian anti-fraud centre at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Financial fraud and scams represent a significant, evolving and increasingly complex threat to Canadians and to our economy, with major impacts felt across the country. In 2025 alone, the Canadian anti-fraud centre received reports of fraud and cybercrime losses totalling over $700 million. This marks eight consecutive years of record losses, and we assess that this represents only a fraction of the actual losses that are being felt. Fraud has become highly organized, industrialized and automated. Canadians are targeted by industrial-scale scam compounds that employ thousands of individuals and operate from various parts of the world. They also face individual fraudsters who leverage easy-to-use, low-cost,…

Opening remarks

Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear today. My name is Anthony Quinn, and I'm the president of CARP, the Canadian Association of Retired Persons. We represent more than 250,000 members across Canada and advocate on issues affecting older Canadians, including financial security, health care and freedom from age discrimination. For older Canadians, fraud can be a life-altering event. When a senior loses money to a scam, they are often losing retirement savings accumulated over decades. The unique peril for senior victims is that they may have little or no opportunity to return to the workforce to earn that money back. For the vast majority of older Canadians, the consequences of fraud are permanent. CARP recently surveyed our members, and over 8,000 replied. More than 82% reported that they had been targeted by a scam and nearly one in five reported having lost money to fraud. All available and reliable sources tell us that only between 5% and 10% of frauds are reported. We therefore believe the true scale of the problem is significantly larger than even our own polling reveals. For the last decade or more, Canadians have been told to be…

Opening remarks

Thank you, Chair. Thank you to the members of the committee for the invitation today. Wealthsimple is Canada's leading financial innovator. We are trusted by more than four million Canadians and hold over $150 billion in assets. Protecting the trust that Canadians place in us is central to what we do. What does fraud look like today? We've spent years hardening our systems against direct attack, but fraud has increasingly moved from attacking those systems to attacking the people using them. Clients of all financial institutions find themselves on the front line. The most damaging attacks are also the hardest to detect, because the fraudster never touches our systems at all. Instead, they get the client to move the money themselves, often while the client believes they're being helped. The tactics are old, but what's new is the speed. With AI, a fraudster can clone a familiar voice or forge a convincing document using tools anyone can download, collapsing what used to take weeks into minutes. This has changed how we fight fraud. We've come to believe that prevention works best when technology and people work together. Everything we do behind the scenes to detect fraud is…