Interac Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Wilmot says Canada’s digital economy has a strong foundation as the company looks to execute its three-year growth strategy. 

In an interview with BNN Bloomberg Thursday, Wilmot said Interac’s debit cards are used by consumers more than six billion times a year, Interac e-transfer is used over 100 million times each month and Interac Verified is used over 500 million times each year.

“The financial services industry is very strong. e-transfer is a well-liked real-time payment method. And so we've got a lot of the building blocks in place. Now it's a question of configuring that, accelerating it, and that's the strategy to do that,” Wilmot said. 

He added that the move toward digitization is happening on a global scale and the highly competitive industry is “recession-proof” and growing at a fast pace. 

On the company’s three-year growth strategy, Wilmot said it will look to enhance its consumer protections in Canada for sending and receiving money. 

“So fraud prevention capabilities through next-generation digital verification, fraud detection, to use AI in order to be smarter in detecting. To centralize data services to be able to also ensure bad actors…that data is shared for that,” he said. 

Secondly, Wilmot said the strategy will involve accelerating the “enablement of debit cards” as well as e-transfer and its verification systems. 

“And we're looking at building a new digital check-out experience as well for Canada made by Canadians,” he said. 

“Then lastly, operating the Real-Time Rail new settlement system from Payments Canada. So Interac plays a key part in helping to build that and then being the technical operator for that. So a lot of things over the next three years.”