Some context for the Rogers and Interac being down on Friday.

June 8th/9th, Celero, a digital service provider for credit unions across Canada was hit by a “cyber security incident”. Naturally, this effected their partners and almost every credit union across at least 4 provinces (as far as I know) are still dealing with the “coming back online” procedures.

What did this do?

Destroyed trust in the security of local credit unions. Caused a massive backlog in daily transactions and limited in person services. Put a hault on any/all tasks that required a computer and or the internet until IT slowly introduced safe and clean devices.

Most credit unions were not at or near 100% operational capacity when Rogers went down Friday morning. Rogers is the service provider for a lot/most Interac cards and terminals (I haven’t looked into the relationship there much yet). Not all debit and POS was down, credit cards still worked and along with more independent POS terminals (squares).

Interac being down means no debit purchases at the majority of vendors, no e-transfers and ATM services were also affected. This led to a run on cash, but all in all just looked like a busy Friday. If that were sustained for a week we would be looking at cash shortages. I expect there will be ripples from this yet where more people will pull out and prefer cash but that’s just speculation.

The timing is what’s interesting to me.

As I’ve laid out, the cyber attack and Rogers/Interac being down is a nice pairing which most people aren’t aware of. Smaller financial institutions can be massively affected and lose a lot of business from this, while larger institutions with more resources, diverse service options and security infrastructure stand to profit.

It seems to me like more legwork towards central bank digital currency.

“Look how insecure it is having all of these moving parts and different companies involved in keeping our daily financial streams moving. Let’s localize this where we can focus effort and security.”

That or the idea of using exclusively/mostly cash or if people start using all their asses for precious metals, land or other resources, or just hide it under the mattress, we might see some more effects and consequences from “low-asset” financial institutions, especially if the smaller ones lose business to the big guys or people start to default on loans and mortgages.

Remember, banks and credit unions need a huge amount of deposits to fund the loans and mortgages they give out. Prolonged Cash runs, in one form or another, have the potential to be devastating.

Your response to their planned crisis is already anticipated.

Hegelian dialectic in full display.