A Canadian payment giant is being sold to U.S. private equity. Is your digital privacy at risk? - CBC

Cindy Mitchell left the federal public service this past spring through workforce adjustment, the process used when federal positions are being cut or eliminated. She was entitled to a transition payment, including $42,151 that was supposed to be transferred into her registered retirement savings plan. The money was issued as a paper cheque. It never reached her bank. Her compensation adviser, the federal pay specialist handling her file, later told Mitchell in correspondence reviewed by The Hill Times that the cheque appeared to have been “intercepted behind the scenes” and that the same thing had happened on “numerous files.” Mitchell is one of three current and former public servants who told The Hill Times they have encountered delayed, missing, or unresolved payments while moving through workforce adjustment. Their stories come as thousands of employees move through the government’s workforce-reduction process, raising questions about whether the federal pay system can keep pace with a surge of complex departure transactions Ottawa knew was coming.

Open this photo in gallery:Canada and the EU are working to modernize the electronic systems that their businesses and people use to move money. Omar Havana/The Associated PressCanada and the European Union plan to link next-generation payment systems to enable faster cross-border transactions, according to a draft joint statement prepared for a summit between Ottawa and Brussels later this month. This will help remove obstacles to business and investment between the two jurisdictions, according to the statement, an early version of a summit communiqué that was viewed by The Globe and Mail. It adds that the new partnership will be called an “Alliance for the Future.”The draft statement doesn’t detail what next-generation payment systems include, but this term has been used by others to refer to a major upgrade of a country’s core payment infrastructure, usually built around real-time payments. The core infrastructure is a central set of systems that clear and settle payments between financial institutions.