Interac Marks 1B Annual e-Transfers

Canadian payment and value exchange service provider Interac said it has reached a “money movement milestone,” with customers using its e-Transfer service making more than 1 billion yearly transactions.

As the company noted in a news release Tuesday (May 31), that milestone — which it hit in April — was a first in the service’s 20-year history. It also represents a 16% transaction increase compared to the prior 12-month period.

Additionally, Interac released findings from a recent survey, which found that younger generations, including Generation Z adults and millennial Canadians, are using Interac e-Transfer to split the cost of shared experiences.

“Canadians have long embraced Interac e-Transfer to send money, but recent rapid growth may demonstrate that the service has achieved a new relevance as Canadians return to the shared experiences that may have been out of reach in the earlier stages of the pandemic,” said Anurag Kar, AVP at Interac. “While young Canadians might be eager to expand their social circles through these shared experiences, they’re often splitting the costs associated with them as a means of helping stay in control of their money and turning to Interac e-Transfer to do so.”

See also: Today in Data: Inflation’s Long Reach

Among the key findings of the survey:

• Every generation said they were concerned about inflation, with 63% of consumers saying they are more cautious about their finances than ever before;
• Younger Canadians are more likely to split the cost of expenses due to inflation than older consumers (62% of Gen Z versus 44% of boomers);
• These younger consumers were more likely to believe splitting the costs of shared experience lets them get more out of life (67% of millennials versus 49% of boomers); and
• Most young Canadians — 73% — say they prefer paying their share as soon as possible to avoid awkward conversation, and 69% believe Interac e-Transfer is the simplest way to split the cost of experiences with others.

Learn more: AI, Passive Authentication Are ‘Game Changers’ for Frictionless Commerce

PYMNTS spoke last week with Jason Paguandas, Interac’s vice president of fraud mitigation and strategy, on how artificial intelligence (AI) can give rise to “dynamic, passive authentication” across every avenue of commerce.

While AI has been a tool used for decades, Paguandas said that “what’s changed as of late is the diversity of data that organizations have access to, especially with some of the trends that we are seeing with the digitization of that data.”