Trust Is the Real Infrastructure: Reflections from the Payments Canada Summit

Josh Cobden

This week, I joined more than 2,300 professionals from across the payments world at the Payments Canada Summit. It was an impressive cross-section of the industry: global card networks, payment processors, every major Canadian bank, fintechs, regulators, consultants, alternative lenders and even Canada’s Minister of Finance. If you wanted a real-time snapshot of where payments is going, this was the room. 

The agenda reflected the growing complexity of the sector. Conversations spanned agentic commerce, Canada’s much anticipated Real-Time Rail, open banking, AI, risk, fraud and payments APIs. It was a highly sophisticated audience tackling equally sophisticated topics. 

And yet, across every keynote, fireside chat, panel discussion and product demo, one word came up again and again: 

Trust. 

It cut through the technical noise with striking consistency. Erin Elofson, President of Mastercard Canada, put it simply and effectively: “Trust is paramount.” Mastercard plays a distinct role as a truly global technology network that brings intelligence, security and trust to the movement of money across institutions, markets and borders. That vantage point gives them unique visibility into patterns of behaviour, emerging risks and new opportunities. When leaders with that perspective emphasize trust, it’s worth paying attention. 

From my perspective as a career communications consultant and trust enthusiast, I took away two reflections. 

First, trust is not a “soft” concept. It’s a hard dependency. 
No matter how much we invest in reducing friction, automating decisions or advancing productivity, technologies will not succeed without trust. In payments, the stakes are particularly high. A failure of trust, whether through fraud, security breaches or flawed AI decisions, has immediate and far-reaching consequences for individuals, businesses and economies. It was reassuring to hear leaders consistently acknowledge that trust is not a byproduct of innovation — it’s a prerequisite for it. 

Second, are we spending enough time understanding trust itself? 
It’s one thing to say trust matters. It’s another to operationalize it. 

Research shows trust is built on three elements in equal measure: ability, integrity and benevolence. In a technical sector like payments, the focus naturally gravitates toward ability. Systems must work. Infrastructure must be resilient. Failures are not an option. 

But competence alone is not enough. 

Integrity, doing what you say consistently and transparently, and benevolence, demonstrating genuine empathy and acting in the best interests of customers, are equally critical. These dimensions are harder to engineer, measure and scale, but they are no less essential. 

This becomes especially important in the context of AI and agentic commerce, two dominant themes at the Summit. The idea that machines will not only assist in purchase decisions but increasingly execute them represents a profound shift. It will require an extraordinary level of trust from consumers to delegate that level of control. 

And yet, we are seeing a growing disconnect. 

According to the Proof Strategies CanTrust Index, AI usage among Canadians is rising, but overall trust is declining year over year. Trust in AI to improve industries like retail and financial services, sectors heavily represented at the Summit, has also dropped. Perhaps most notably, there is a significant gap between how much executives trust AI and how much the general public does. 

That gap matters. 

Leaders are rightly focused on the business imperative to harness AI and stay competitive. But that optimism and enthusiasm must be balanced against the very real skepticism of employees and customers. If organizations over-index on capability while underinvesting in integrity and benevolence, they risk accelerating adoption in ways that erode trust rather than build it. 

Which brings me to the central takeaway: 

The payments industry does not just need to prioritize trust. It needs to understand it. 

Trust must be intentionally designed, consistently demonstrated and continuously measured. It must be built not only into the technology, but into the behaviours, decisions and communications that surround it. 

For payments leaders, the call to action is clear. As you innovate and scale, whether through real-time payments, open banking or AI, commit not only to making systems faster and smarter, but also trustworthy. 

Because in the end, trust is the real payments infrastructure.