Canada’s fintech sector is often defined by the brands consumers see, but much of the infrastructure powering those experiences operates behind the scenes.
Peoples Group plays a central role in that layer, providing deposits, regulatory infrastructure and payment capabilities to more than 1,500 fintechs and merchants. Over the past year, the company facilitated $8 billion in issuing volume, $88 billion in acquiring volume and $37 billion in money movement for its partners.
As Associate Vice-President of Strategic Accounts, Rohitash Hurla works closely with fintechs navigating the transition from startup to scale. In this conversation with Fintech.ca, Hurla discusses the evolution of embedded finance, the demand for faster and more flexible payments, and the challenge of innovating while meeting increasingly complex regulatory expectations.
He also explains what Peoples Group’s next-generation payments platform with Fiserv will mean for Canadian fintechs, why richer payment data matters, and how new infrastructure and licensing pathways could help Canada’s fintech ecosystem move faster.
Peoples Group often works behind the scenes with fintechs, merchants, and challenger financial brands. How do you describe the role Peoples plays in Canada’s fintech ecosystem today?
RH: We think of ourselves as an ecosystem connector, not just a service provider. Fintechs, challenger banks and PSPs come to us for the pieces that are hardest to build alone – deposits, regulatory infrastructure and payments – so they can focus on what makes their product distinct instead of building infrastructure and the operational requirements around it from scratch.
Over the past year alone, that’s meant facilitation of $8 billion in issuing volume, $88 billion in acquiring volume and $37 billion in money movement on behalf of our partners. We may not have the recognizable name on the end-user payment experience, but we’re very often the reason that the experience works.
At the Canada FinTech Symposium, you were part of discussions on embedded finance and platform economics. What does embedded finance look like in Canada right now, and where is it still early?
RH: It’s still early days, and the experience today is a bit disjointed. Payments has raced ahead of everything else – tap-to-pay, e-transfer, embedded checkout feel status quo to Canadian now. But embedded deposits, embedded lending, and embedded credit are arguably further behind. It’s not a lifestyle choice the way it is in some other markets – most Canadians aren’t casually opening a savings account or getting a loan approved inside a retailer’s app the way payments has become invisible.
The other piece is access. Embedded finance isn’t democratized yet. There’s a meaningful segment of the population for some of these embedded products, whether because of credit history, documentation or how risk models are built. Closing that gap is where a lot of the next wave of innovation needs to go.
For fintechs trying to scale, what separates a strong strategic account or partnership from a simple vendor relationship?
RH: A vendor relationship is transactional – you buy a service, you use it, you move on. A strategic partnership evolves with the fintech’s journey and is built on a foundation of trust and understanding of their strategic goals. Some partners need a single point solution at first, and that’s fine. But the ones who scale successfully tend to move toward wanting a single trusted partner across deposits, regulatory compliance and payments – someone who understands their business well enough to grow with them rather than just process them. We aim to be that one-stop partner, because it means we’re solving problems before they become blockers, not just filling in a service order.
Peoples Group enables more than 1,500 fintechs and merchants, with significant monthly money movement volume. What are fintech clients asking for most right now: speed, compliance, flexibility, reliability, or something else?
RH: Flexibility and speed, without question. Everyone wants 24/7, always-on payments because that’s what Canadians expect. But there’s a healthy tension underneath that: speed can’t come at the expense of compliance. What’s changed is that fintechs increasingly understand that and are willing to own their share of it. They’re asking for partners who can move fast and hold the line on compliance, and they’re stepping up to be accountable for their piece of the equation rather than treating it as someone else’s problem.
Peoples Group recently partnered with Fiserv to build a next-generation payments platform. What does that investment mean for fintechs and financial institutions in Canada?
RH: This is one of the most significant technology investments for us. Build on Fiserv’s Enterprise Payments Platform, it positions us to offer instant payments, always-on infrastructure and rich ISO 20022 data to our partners ahead of Payments Canada’s Real-Time Rail deployment. Practically, it means fintechs and financial institutions who partner with us will get access to enterprise-grade infrastructure without having to build or maintain it themselves, so they can focus their resources where it matters most instead of their plumbing.
How important will instant payments, always-on infrastructure, and richer payment data be to the next wave of fintech innovation in Canada?
RH: This isn’t modernization for its own sake. Faster payments genuinely change people’s lives and matter to the broader economy. Real-time infrastructure removes a lot of the friction that’s been holding businesses back from doing what they actually want to do with their money. And richer data is really the foundation for what comes next: open banking runs on data, and open banking is going to reshape adjacent industries too – insurance being a good example of that.
According to a January 2026 Competition Bureau study, data portability could save Canadians billions if they can easily and securely transfer their personal data from one service to another – and that’s just within the insurance industry. Overall, the impact of increased competition is expected to reduce the $7.7 billion Canadians currently pay in banking fees.
Canada’s fintech market has often been described as slower-moving than the U.S. or U.K. What structural barriers still hold back fintech innovation here?
RH: There’s some truth to that, but the picture is changing and I’d like to push back a little in the ‘slower’ framing as a permanent state. The lack of a Real-Time Rail has been a real gap – but Payments Canada now has 15 new participants in the pipeline and the Bank of Canada has introduced a fast-track process for new bank licenses under the Retail Payments Activities Act framework. That’s meaningful movement.
The structural barrier that remains is that many fintechs and challenger institutions still rely on incumbent infrastructure on the back end. So even if a fintech is willing to take on risk and innovate, if the institution supporting their infrastructure isn’t willing to move with them, the whole thing stalls. That dependency is real. But we’re also starting to see it loosen – new rails, new participants and new licensing pathways are chipping away at it.
As fintechs grow, how do their needs change when it comes to risk, compliance, fraud prevention, and regulatory expectations?
RH: Early on, most fintechs lean on a partner to handle the bulk of risk, compliance and fraud infrastructure. As they scale, more of them start looking at direct participation in networks which is a sign of maturity, but it also means taking on real operational weight: capital investment, governance, 24/7 uptime obligations, fraud controls, incident response. That’s not a light switch. A lot of fast-scaling fintechs find that a hybrid model – direct where it adds strategic value and connected through a partner like us for the rest – lets them grow without taking on more operational burden than makes sense where they are.
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