This Week in Canadian Money: Interac has a new product

+ There's a fancy new toonie, Fiscal.ai is on a partnership spree, and more.

Hey, welcome back.

Here are 5 things that caught my eye this week in Canadian money:

1. The Mint released a CN Tower-themed toonie

Why? To celebrate the tower’s 50th anniversary. The big five-o.

The coin is glow-in-the-dark and already in circulation, meaning you might soon be looking at your change and C N the CN Tower.

2. Fiscal.ai announced partnerships with Perplexity, Anthropic, and Kalshi

I won’t dive into the details of each partnership, but the gist is:
Fiscal.ai (a Toronto startup) now supplies financial data to these companies’ platforms or directly integrates with them.

What I want to focus on here is why these partnerships are noteworthy. And to answer that, all you have to do is look at who the partners are (arguably the leaders in their respective categories):

• Perplexity: the top AI search engine

• Claude (Anthropic): the top AI model

• Kalshi: the top prediction market

Related read: Wealthsimple is getting into prediction trading

So when a startup partners with all three of these big companies in just two weeks, it’s a big deal. I see the benefits as:

1. Social proof
   ↳ Associating with market leaders builds major credibility.

2. Embedded
   ↳ The company becomes an important piece of the partners’ offerings. E.g. with Kalshi, millions of dollars will be placed on trades that rely on Fiscal.ai data.

3. Greater reach
   ↳ By going onto big platforms, the company’s data gets used by millions of new users almost overnight.

4. More eyeballs
   ↳ The partnerships get people talking and also gets the company onto the radar of people who otherwise might not know about it.
   (Note to Fiscal.ai: brace yourself for the massive and utterly overwhelming exposure you’re about to receive by being featured in this email. I won’t invoice you for the publicity this time round, but if you want to announce a fourth partnership, I’m open to sponsors wink-wink)

Now, why should you care about any of this?

• In general, we as Canadians should root for Canadian startups to do well

• It’s interesting to know where data come from

• It’s exciting to learn about high-trajectory companies in their early days

With how fast Fiscal.ai is moving, I wouldn’t be surprised if they announced more partnerships before the, ahem, fiscal year-end.

3. EQ Bank had its annual shareholder meeting

The meeting was pretty standard for these sorts of things:

• Board of Directors were elected

• Corporate auditor was appointed

• Executive pay was voted on

4. RBC had its annual shareholder meeting

The biggest news from this:

• The bank announced it’ll launch a fund for Canadian companies

• Up to $1B in funding will go toward helping companies build and grow here (lest they move to the US)

Hey RBC, send some of that $1B my way. This newsletter could use a cash infusion.

5. Interac’s Konek got a rebrand

You’re probably wondering: what is Konek?

Fair question. It has had a low profile.

Konek is sort of like Google Pay or Apple Pay - it’s one of the payment options you’ll be presented with when buying something online. When you click Konek, you’ll see different payment methods, including:

• Credit card

• Debit card

• Interac Direct ← this is what’s important and fairly new. It lets you pay directly (hence the name) from your bank with your savings or chequing account.

Konek interface. Example of how it looks and the option to select Interac Direct. Source: konek.ca

With that explained, there are three important things to note:

1. Konek/Interac Direct gives consumers more options for paying online.

   Don’t want to or don’t like paying with a card? Now you don’t have to.

2. Limited use since Staples is the only merchant that currently offers Konek.

   So unless you’re buying a lot of office supplies, you can’t really use it. With that said, they are adding new merchants. The website lists four more companies, albeit not as big as Staples (to be frank, I only know one of the four):

Upcoming Konek merchants. Source: konek.ca

3. There was a rebrand.

   It was called KONEK but it seems to not be yelling anymore and has now mellowed out as Konek. Also, the colour scheme changed from white and pinkish-purple to black and yellow (like the Interac colours).

Old logo and colour scheme. Source: https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/banking-services/konek/index.html

So why does this matter? Because we’re seeing this grow in real-time. From the rebrand to the new merchants coming online to even new posts these past few days on the Konek LinkedIn page - Interac seems to be working on ramping this up for mainstream use.

Side note: Interac seems to really dislike the letter t at the end of words:

• Interac(t)

• Konek(t) [which is basically just “Connec(t)”]

What’s next, Transac? Collec? Also, why does Interac Direct have the t? For consistency, shouldn’t it be Interac Direc?

Interac, if you’re reading this: I need answers on the dropping and not dropping of the t at the end. Let’s chat. You can call me or send a tex.

Hey, thanks for reading! Two things before you go:

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Here’s last week’s post in case you missed it:

This Week in Canadian Money: The Sunshine List is out

See you next week 👋

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References

The Mint

• https://www.mint.ca/en/discover/canadian-commemorative-circulation-program/2026/cn-tower

Fiscal.ai

• https://fiscal.ai/blog/perplexity-fiscal/

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fiscaldotai_im-pleased-to-announce-our-partnership-with-activity-7325613391333511169-_TrH

• https://fiscal.ai/blog/how-to-connect-fiscal-ai-mcp-with-claude/

• https://fiscal.ai/blog/fiscal-ai-and-kalshi-partner-to-power-a-new-era-of-company-kpi-prediction-markets/

EQ Bank

• https://eqb.investorroom.com/annual-reports?cat=127

• [opens a PDF] https://filecache.investorroom.com/mr5ircnw_eqbank2/1625/Voting%20Results%20-%20April%208%2C%202026.pdf

RBC

• https://www.rbc.com/investor-relations/annual-meetings.html

• https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/business/rbc-plans-to-invest-up-to-1-billion-through-new-canadian-growth-fund/article_6229cf7f-abd7-5f15-8422-8a0394cceb6e.html

Konek

• https://retail-insider.com/retail-insider/2025/11/konek-powered-by-interac-and-leading-canadian-financial-institutions-launches-canadas-homegrown-e-commerce-payment-platform-with-staples-canada-as-first-national-merchant/

• https://konek.ca/en/

• https://www.interac.ca/en/content/business/interac-direct-a-new-e-commerce-payment-solution-that-meets-your-customers-needs/