In 2025, American-owned Visa and Mastercard controlled 96 percent of Canada’s credit card market
many consumers pay with Apple-issued iPhones or use terminals run by American companies, such as Chase, Global Payments, Square, and Stripe.
A system that inconveniences a judge today could, in theory, be turned against a whole country tomorrow. The United Kingdom is reportedly exploring a national alternative to Visa and Mastercard over fears Trump could use United States–owned payment providers to freeze its economy. European officials have warned the continent is dangerously exposed to such coercion.
Canada had a taste of that vulnerability during the 2022 Rogers outage, which affected over 12 million subscribers (including Interac). It was estimated the economic cost to the broader Canadian economy was $142 million. Cloudflare’s global outage in 2025 only lasted about six hours but was estimated to cost Shopify over $4 million (US).
96% seems low, 4% of transactions use what amex? We do not have a credit card thing of our own unless you count over drafts on interact.
Amex and Discover and Diner’s Club and several store brands and …
Many of the other issues could be somewhat under customer control (such as choosing interac or cash), but not this one.
That would take the businesses to work together to find a solution. And I don’t have high confidence in that happening.
Helcim is an alternative I just found.