That's because you need Royal Assent in order to be a bank in Canada. Unlike the US that has hundreds (if not thousands) of banks, Canada only has 5 (or is it 6 now?) massive banks.
Having only a few big banks makes it much easier to roll out new technology.
> That's because you need Royal Assent in order to be a bank in Canada. Unlike the US that has hundreds (if not thousands) of banks, Canada only has 5 (or is it 6 now?) massive banks.
This isn't really accurate, in that creating a bank nowadays requires only conformation to The Bank Act, not any royal (or by-proxy Governor General) consent. There are 44 domestic or domestic-subsidiary-of-foreign-corporation Schedule 1 banks in Canada, and 600+ credit unions. The big 5 dominate, but more for historical reasons than anything else.
The long prevalence of things like chip-and-pin and email money transfers and other modern amenities that are just starting to show up in the US has more to do with a marked preference for standardization governed by industry consortiums like Interac in Canada, rather than multiple competing, incompatible credit networks that debit piggybacks on top of, I suspect.
Most credit unions in Quebec are part of the Desjardins group. They don't seem especially widespread outside of Quebec.
Quickly glancing at the ownership of 9 of the 10 largest credit unions outside of Quebec, 8 of the 9 were unrelated to Desjardins. The 4th largest (Meridian Credit of Ontario) was the sole exception. I couldn't find info on the 9th largest, Cambrian Credit of Manitoba.
No, not next year, and not in any meaningful way until 2015 at earliest. They only required backend processing networks be capable of handling chip-and-pin transactions by mid-2013, which is a prerequisite for any acquirer/merchant using that network actually putting a reader in any store. Between then and 2015, nothing changes except recommendations that if a merchant is replacing their POS equipment, they choose one that supports reading chips, and that banks start issuing more cards with chips. Only in 2015 will Visa start incentivizing switching to chip-and-pin readers by, for example, removing the requirement that merchants validate PCI compliance if at least 75% of their transactions annually are chip-and-pin instead of swiped.
Really? I'm very surprised. Canada has moved over many years ago. I thought we'd be following the US here.
Is chip and pin in the works? ie is this a stop gap for the next year or two until its rolled out or is the US just not bothering with it?