EY Report October 2023 | Page 16

EY CANADA

a car or booking a holiday for example .

Embedded payments effectively remove the need to pull out your card or toggle to a different experience or application to make a payment , but it instead seamlessly initiates the payment as a part of an experience . “ Think Uber ,” Halder says .

Embedded payments is one area that EY Canada Payments is really focusing on , anticipating that the total addressable market for such services will reach trillions of dollars within the decade . “ You have cheaper tech that ’ s coming online , making it accessible and available for businesses and individuals to innovate upon .” Halder says . “ Group that with the standardisation of payment messages , the spread of openbanking and real-time payments and you have yourself the ideal conditions for embedded payments .”

This will obviously , then , be a huge area of focus for the team at EY . The company itself will be building out its assets and support services so that it can play a key role in that transformation of Canada ’ s realtime payments industry – and , of course , EY Canada will continue to work hand-in-hand with the diverse list of clients that it already numbers among its clientele . They include financial institutions and credit unions , big tech , entertainment and media companies , ecommerce platforms as well as paytechs and fintechs .

Finally , the company is big on ESG and diversity . With its ‘ Women . Fast forward ’

Global EY workforce

programme , EY Canada will continue to champion women in the workplace , bolstered by those impressive figures about the number of female employees in management roles within its own organisation .

But there is still a long way to go . According to a study by Equileap , the vast majority ( 81 %) of Canadian firms do not publish details of their gender pay gap – although this number is inching down year-on-year . When it comes

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