A Letter From… Toronto
By Jeremie Feuillette (Managing Director, Global Head of Liquidity Optimisation Solutions) & Florian Loecker (Chief Product & Technology Officer)
Toronto greeted us with a sharp cold that felt like –20°C, but the week itself was warm, focused, fast-moving, and a wonderful way to finish the year. It set the stage to start January at full speed for FNA and our Canadian clients and partners.
We found ourselves moving constantly between two worlds. One moment, we were high above the city at Louix Louis in the St. Regis, sitting with senior leaders, talking openly about priorities, scale, and what really matters as institutions grow and ecosystems change. Next, we were back on the ground, in intense working sessions inside our clients’ walls, where data was tested, assumptions challenged, and decisions were made that would shape the ILO delivery.
What struck us wasn’t the ambition—there is no shortage of that in Canadian banking, as seen by recent news on the US market—but the pace. This wasn’t a week spent describing a future state. It was about putting real capability live, quickly, and in a way that would stand up to regulatory, operational, and financial scrutiny in Canada and abroad.
At its core, what we build at FNA is an intraday liquidity operating layer. Capabilities like ILO sit across payment rails to give treasury and operations teams real-time visibility, forecasting, and control—especially as volumes rise and settlement speeds compress. In Toronto, that stopped being an abstract description and became something tangible to turn actors into leaders.
From intent to execution
By the end of the week, the ILO (Intraday Liquidity Optimization) suite had moved from intent to execution. It is not a pilot or a concept, but working infrastructure, with a go-live measured in months rather than years. Strategy turned into live controls, production data flows, and operational workflows that teams can rely on during the day, not just review after it.
That shift matters. Intraday liquidity is no longer a static discipline. Payment volumes are higher. Settlement cycles are shorter. The tolerance for delay is thinner. Control now depends on seeing pressure early and being able to act within the day—through intelligent, augmented capabilities that go beyond static reporting and rule-based monitoring. It requires combining predictive forecasting, dynamic flow control, and targeted automated action across payment rails.
The assessments completed and the early numbers already emerging point in the same direction. This work is helping strengthen the bank’s position not just in Canada, but across a growing US and North American footprint. The focus has been deliberately practical: better visibility, faster reaction times, and more confidence as scale and complexity increase.
Regulation as a design constraint
Much of our time was spent talking about regulation, but not as a usual reporting obligation.
Canadian supervisors, including the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), are increasingly clear about expectations around intraday visibility, forward-looking indicators, and demonstrable control. The emphasis is shifting from retrospective explanation to anticipation: understanding where stress will emerge and being able to evidence how you would respond.
This isn’t unique to Canada. Europe’s experience with TARGET Instant Payment Settlement has already shown how quickly liquidity dynamics change once real-time settlement scales. Liquidity is consumed faster. Risks concentrate earlier. Static buffers offer less comfort. Managing this environment means controlling liquidity at the level of individual payment rails, supported by operating capabilities that can forecast, monitor, and intervene before stress materialises.
Money that behaves differently
Stablecoins and tokenised money came up often, though rarely as a headline topic. They are no longer treated as distant experiments. They are increasingly understood as additional settlement rails, each with its own timing, liquidity, and risk characteristics. Tokenised money settles differently. It behaves differently. And it challenges assumptions that have held for decades.
The question we kept coming back to wasn’t whether banks will engage with these forms of money, but how to do so without fragmenting liquidity oversight. The answer, increasingly, points toward a single operating layer—one that can integrate traditional rails and tokenised instruments into the same forecasting, stress, and control framework.
Ambition, expressed through delivery
What stood out most was how ambition showed up in practice. Not through transformation rhetoric, but through sequencing and discipline. What needs to be live first? Where is the low-hanging fruit and the biggest risk? What must be tightly controlled? Where does automation genuinely add resilience rather than complexity?
As Canadian banks expand globally, particularly through a rapidly growing US footprint, intraday liquidity is moving beyond a back-office reporting concern and becoming a core financial and strategic control. Capabilities like ILO are designed to support that shift, helping institutions scale with confidence as volumes, rails, and regulatory expectations increase.
Some of the most important moments didn’t happen in formal meetings. They happened over shared datasets, in quick adjustments to assumptions, or during short conversations between sessions. That’s often where execution really accelerates.
The FNA team on the way to a client visit
The human system
We started the week at CRAFT Beer Market, focused on bonding, alignment, and setting the tone for the days ahead. Surrounded by the noise of hockey games and December energy, it was a reminder that delivery ultimately rests with people—the ones who operate these capabilities day-to-day, and who respond when volumes spike or liquidity tightens.
The technology needs to be robust. But the objective is human: giving treasury, payments, and operations teams the confidence to act at real-time speed, across multiple rails, under tighter regulation, without losing control.
Canadian banks are building for scale across markets, rails, and settlement speeds. The leaders will be those who turn regulatory strength into an operational edge. We are excited to support that journey in Canada, across North America, and beyond.
