💸 Moneris Sale Puts Canadian Payment Sovereignty at Risk
Author: The CANADA List Team
Published: Sept 7, 2026
BMO and RBC have agreed to sell their jointly owned payment processor, Moneris, to San Francisco-based private equity firm Francisco Partners for approximately $2 billion. The transaction, announced on August 10, has not yet closed. It remains subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.
That review should not be treated as a formality. Moneris is not an ordinary software company. It supports more than 325,000 points of commerce and, by its own account, processes one in every three transactions in Canada. It sits inside the infrastructure Canadians rely on to move money every day and produces valuable information about where, when, and how Canadians spend.
The concern is not just that this change in ownership would expose Canadians' personal financial information. It's also a concern about control. Once a system this central to Canadian commerce is sold, strategic decisions about investment, technology, data governance, service levels, and the company's long-term direction will ultimately be made by a foreign owner whose primary obligation is to its investors.
BMO and RBC say they will enter long-term, exclusive referral arrangements with Moneris after the sale. That makes the proposed structure especially difficult to accept: two of Canada's largest banks would continue directing Canadian businesses toward Moneris while giving up Canadian ownership of the platform itself. The banks receive the immediate proceeds, but Canada loses influence over a strategic payments asset that took 25 years to build.
Ottawa has the tools to examine the broader public interest. The Investment Canada Act allows the federal government to review foreign investments for national-security concerns regardless of their value. The government's own guidance identifies critical infrastructure, sensitive personal data, and economic security among the factors that can matter. A payment processor operating at Moneris's scale deserves that level of scrutiny.
Our take
Canada cannot talk seriously about economic sovereignty while casually allowing essential economic infrastructure to leave Canadian control. Payment systems are part of the foundation on which domestic commerce operates. Once ownership is gone, rebuilding that capacity at home would be slow, expensive, and uncertain.
Regulators should require BMO, RBC, and Francisco Partners to demonstrate that the deal truly serves Canada's long-term interests (which seems a tough sell), not merely why it benefits the parties to the transaction.
A public petition is calling on the Government of Canada to prevent Moneris from passing into non-Canadian control and to subject major payment-processor acquisitions to stronger public-interest and national-security review. We strongly encourage everyone to read the petition, and to consider signing it to support keeping Moneris under Canadian ownership.
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