Scotiabank’s Dougal Middleton on bringing payments Modernization to light in Canada

Payments Canada caught up with Dougal Middleton, Vice President Payments Modernization Business Lead, Enterprise Payments at Scotiabank to talk about the work he and his team are doing in support of Canada’s payments Modernization journey.

What areas of payments Modernization are you involved with?
I lead the overall business prioritization and decision support around the program from an Enterprise perspective. I work closely with all of our business partners, overseeing the prioritization of the Modernization roadmap as well as the execution of those priorities within our agile ecosystem.

I also lead our industry relations team which represents the bank at various external forums and collaborates with Payments Canada to provide strategic direction across the program.

Modernization is a multi-stream initiative. Can you share how Scotiabank is approaching the journey?
At Scotiabank, how we work is extremely important to the execution of the program.  We combine business and technology across the enterprise to help us develop better platforms that enable us to move more quickly from strategy to action to results.

As an agile organization, we’re also executing the program by delivering a series of reusable components which allow us to be nimble and flexible as the overall industry program details unfold.

We also bring an international perspective to the program with our global footprint. For example, we can gather key learnings from jurisdictions we operate in where real-time payment systems are already in place, such as Mexico and Columbia. Conversely, we look at the investments that we’re making within our enterprise payments infrastructure in Canada and look for opportunities to reuse those investments elsewhere.

When it comes to the end benefit realizations of payments Modernization, what are you most looking forward to?
First of all, this is a once in-a-life-time change that’s taking place here in Canada.

I would say that I’m most excited about seeing data-rich and faster payments help streamline commerce and enable more efficient business processes for our business customers of all sizes.

As new capabilities evolve as a result of data-rich, real-time payments with greater transparency, there are a lot of innovative opportunities that can happen in the business domain. In Canada we’ve been well served by Interac e-transfers for consumers for many years. However, the business payments domain is at a tipping point where enhanced data can drive efficiencies we haven’t been able to unlock with historical payment services.

Faster payments applied to a variety of use cases promises to further lubricate the gears of the economy as we speed into the future of payments.