A panel at SBC Summit Canada examined how Interac’s grip on Canadian payments is shaping player expectations – and what real-time rails will demand from operators
Withdrawals, not deposits, are where operator trust is won or lost. This was the thread running through ‘Payments That Perform: What Actually Moves the Needle in Canadian iGaming’ at SBC Summit Canada 2026, where Dami Amurawaiye, Head of Sportsbook at PointsBet Canada, said the withdrawal journey begins at registration. not when a customer clicks the button.
By the time a withdrawal request arrives, an operator’s risk models should already know whether to route the customer through a frictionless path or flag them for additional checks.
“Once they get that money very quickly, you fulfil that trust they have in you – and that’s when they come back for repeat deposits,” he said.
Sam Kawsarani, VP of Product at Paramount Commerce added customers will not tolerate friction on withdrawal simply because it is their money. “That’s what actual trust is really earned on,” he said.
The panel – which also included Gaurav Juneja, SVP and Business Unit Leader at CGI, and was moderated by Kevin Jing of HotTakes – agreed that Interac’s dominance in Canada has created a consumer expectations problem for anyone introducing a new payment method.
With 89% national adoption, any alternative must match its reliability before it can compete on anything else. Amurawaiye said operators who tried to build around Interac at Ontario’s launch saw conversion rates suffer, but noted the lesson was not specific to Interac. “Every jurisdiction you go into has an existing payments ecosystem that dictates consumer preference,” he said. “You can’t just take your existing payment stack and plop it in.”
Canada: RTR’s uneven arrival
Real-Time Rail (RTR) – Canada’s forthcoming instant payments infrastructure – was framed less as a solution than as a challenge to prepare for. Juneja acknowledged Canada is one of the last G7 countries to adopt it. When it arrives, its first phase covers withdrawals only – not deposits – which Amurawaiye said creates an immediate operational problem.
Risk models which run slowly enough to work within Interac’s timeframes will not be fast enough for real-time payments. “The transaction needs to go out almost immediately, so now we need to make sure those models are churning out predictions almost instantly,” he said.
Kawsarani warned against assuming RTR availability at the PSP level means availability across a whole user base. Interac itself rolled out unevenly, with different banks applying different limits over the years. RTR will follow the same curve, and operators building strategies around it need to account for that.
Who owns the data problem
On fraud and risk architecture, Amurawaiye said technology structure matters more than model quality. Operators running customer data across multiple jurisdictional databases, or relying on third-party systems that models cannot access in real time, will produce inaccurate predictions regardless of how sophisticated those models are.
“You can have the best model in the world, but if it doesn’t have the right data at the right time, your predictions will be off,” he said.
Juneja’s longer-term view was that RTR could eventually support industry-wide models that remove the need for every operator to build their own KYC and fraud infrastructure.
“The more operators need to identify each other and do AML and KYC separately, the less productive we become as a society,” he said. Whether this vision survives contact with Canada’s fragmented regulatory reality remains to be seen.
For more panels like this, see the full agenda at SBC Americas, taking place 9–11 June 2026.
