alt Hacker NewsAs a historical note, "e-transfer" is actually the third major branding of the service.
Acxsys [1] was launched by the Canadian banks in 1996 as a for-profit startup meant to develop online payment solutions, and they original launched the service as "certapay".
Acxsys was folded into Interac in 2018, but I think it was somewhat prior to that the certapay name was discontinued in favour of "email money transfer". Everyone called them e-transfers though, and so eventually Interac gave up on EMT and just went with that name, which is what it is now: https://www.interac.ca/en/resources/personal-resources/perso...
E-transfers sucked for the first decade because there was a several dollar fee associated with them, making them impractical for small amounts. I’m miserly so I low-key dreaded ordering takeout with other staff on night shifts, and having to pay the fee to square up with the person who ordered.
As an aside, there was an e-purse pilot sometime between 1996-1998 in Southern Ontario. It may have been Visa or MC driven rather than Interact/Acxsys.
I remember seeing a booth at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1996 where they demoed a smart card that could be used for web transactions (!) using a floppy drive adaptor (!!).
1990s fintech was wild.