Interac Corp. has announced that Global Payments, a payment technology and software company that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes worldwide, will enable Konek across its merchant network in Canada. Konek is Canada’s digital wallet, powered by Interac and backed by the country’s leading financial institutions. The integration gives thousands of Canadian businesses nationwide the ability to offer account-based payments alongside traditional card payments at checkout.
Account-based payments, meaning purchases paid directly from a chequing or savings account rather than through a credit or debit card network, are powered by Interac Direct, a feature available exclusively on Konek. Global Payments is rolling out Konek starting with its API, before expanding into built-in online checkout and hosted payment solutions, with broad availability to Global Payments’ Canadian merchant customers expected by fall 2026.
Kris Zanuldin, head of Konek at Interac, tied the rollout to a broader shift already underway in how Canadians want to pay. “We are proud to collaborate with Global Payments to scale the availability of Konek to more businesses of all sizes across the country,” Zanuldin said. “This enablement of Konek underscores accelerated momentum across Canada’s payments ecosystem as merchants and consumers seek more flexible, secure checkout experiences and access to account-based payment solutions.”
The announcement cites Interac’s own research to support that framing: nearly half of mobile wallet users in Canada (47%) say they value the convenience of mobile wallet payments, while 42% of younger Canadians, spanning Gen Z and Millennials, say they’re increasingly open to paying directly from their bank accounts for online purchases. The findings come from the Follow-Up survey component of Interac’s 2025 Payments Diary study, fielded in December 2025 among just over 3,000 Canadian consumers aged 15 and older.
Chris Baron, general manager and Canada country head at Global Payments, framed the integration around a specific competitive pressure merchants are facing at checkout. “Canadian merchants are navigating rising consumer expectations, and checkout has become a real differentiator,” Baron said. “Enabling Konek gives merchants access to a solution that’s built for how Canadians want to pay. This includes more direct, bank-based payment options that offer speed, security and flexibility, all while helping them manage the cost of acceptance in the process.”
One structural detail worth noting is Konek shifts fraud liability from the merchant to the issuer, the financial institution behind the account, rather than leaving merchants exposed the way they often are with some card transactions. Interac says this, combined with account-based payments generally costing less to accept than most traditional cards, is part of what makes Konek attractive to merchants beyond just offering customers another checkout option.
For everyday Canadian shoppers, this rollout mostly changes what shows up as a payment option at checkout, an additional way to pay directly from a bank account rather than a card, at merchants who use Global Payments. For merchants themselves, the more consequential part is the cost and liability shift: paying less to accept payments while also carrying less fraud risk is a meaningfully different proposition than simply adding another logo to the checkout page.
Herald View: The real story here isn’t really about consumer choice at checkout, it’s about who bears the cost when something goes wrong. Card networks have spent decades building trust partly by absorbing fraud risk on the merchant’s behalf, and merchants have paid for that protection through interchange fees. Konek’s pitch flips part of that equation, lower acceptance costs, but with fraud liability sitting with the issuer instead. Whether Canadian merchants adopt this at scale will depend less on flashy checkout convenience and more on whether banks are actually willing and able to absorb that liability reliably once volumes get large. That’s the quieter bet buried in this announcement.