A common complaint about Mark Carney’s hugely anticipated budget is that it is not nearly bold enough on the biggest issues facing the day, from housing, to immigration, to cost of living. Budget 2025, critics argue, is more shoulders up than “elbows up”: a shrug in the face of a country in crisis.

But boldness is in the eye of the beholder. And for a Canadian sector like financial technology, where inertia was the status quo for far too long, Carney’s budget is looking refreshingly bold — if, that is, industry leaders hold the federal government to account.

Indeed, Budget 2025 finally achieved something Canada’s fintech sector has been waiting on for years: it set real, public dates for open banking. This is a major development, and a cause for genuine celebration in a nation that has spent the better part of a decade debating modernizing its financial system with little to show for it. But timelines are only valuable if they are met, and it would be imprudent to pretend Canada doesn’t have a long history of falling behind on the open banking file.

The good news is that the........

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