Could Ottawa's investigation of Interac e-Transfer lead to lower transaction fees?

financialpost.com:

If you’ve ever used online banking to send money as a gift, pay a friend back for dinner or send rent to your landlord, there’s a good chance you used Interac e-Transfer to do it. The service allows people to request, send and receive money directly through Canadian personal and business bank accounts. Interac Corp. says 88 per cent of Canadians have used e-Transfer, and the company processed nearly 1.2 billion transactions in 2023.

But now, the government is questioning whether Interac’s e-Transfer service is anti-competitive — and politicians have asked the Competition Bureau to step in and investigate. Here’s what you need to know about the most ubiquitous payments exchange provider in Canada, and how it came to be in the crosshairs of government watchdogs.

First, a little on Interac: it was formed in 1984 as a non-profit co-operative between five founding financial institutions: Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Desjardins Group. Interac was incorporated in 2013, and has since been run as a for-profit, privately held company.

At the heart of the issue is whether Interac’s governance and fee structure unfairly benefits Canada’s large financial institutions and disadvantages smaller players and potential competitors. Interac charges e-Transfer fees to financial institutions, who in turn may charge customers fees to send them — usually between $1 and $1.50, depending on their banking plan.

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner has called Interac’s fee schedule a “closely guarded secret,” but was able to confirm at an Oct. 28 meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology that Interac uses a tiered volume-based pricing