Consumer vs. Business e-Transfer: What's Different
The Interac e-Transfer that Canadians use to split rent and pay back friends has a $3,000 per-transfer limit. The business version sits at $25,000 per transfer at most major banks — though per-institution limits vary. TD, RBC, and Scotiabank all have different exact caps; confirm with your bank before counting on the maximum.
Beyond the limit, the business product has features the consumer version never had. The big one is Request Money: instead of waiting for a customer to initiate a transfer to your email address, you send them a payment request directly via email, SMS, or QR code. They approve it from their banking app. The funds move in minutes. No manual verification. No "did you get my e-Transfer?" phone calls.
Automated reconciliation is the other meaningful difference. Consumer e-Transfers arrive with whatever note the sender typed — sometimes nothing, sometimes an incomprehensible string. Business e-Transfer through an API integration (more on that below) can attach structured data: invoice numbers, customer IDs, reference codes. Your accounting software can match payments to invoices automatically.
The Request Money Feature in Practice
Request Money is Interac's answer to the "invoice and chase" problem that plagues service businesses. Here's how it works in practice:
You send a payment request to your client's email or phone number. They receive a notification from Interac, tap to approve through their banking app, and confirm the amount. The funds land in your account within minutes — typically faster than a card payment that settles the next business day.
Use cases where this works well: professional services invoicing ($500–$25,000 range), residential rent collection, contractors collecting deposits, healthcare practitioners collecting fees not covered by provincial plans, tutors and personal trainers collecting session fees.
What it doesn't replace: retail point-of-sale (customers at a physical counter won't want to wait for a push notification), subscriptions requiring automated recurring billing (PAD/pre-authorized debit is better for that), or any situation where the customer is paying from outside Canada.
API Integration: How Businesses Actually Set This Up
The Request Money feature and automated reconciliation aren't available through your business banking portal directly — you need an API middleware layer. Three Canadian fintechs dominate this space:
VoPay (Vancouver-based) provides an Interac e-Transfer API that lets businesses embed e-Transfer collection into their invoicing workflow, website, or app. Their documentation is solid and they focus on Canadian businesses specifically.
Apaylo recently boosted their business e-Transfer transaction limit to $25,000 and targets small-to-mid-size Canadian businesses that want API access without building a full banking relationship.
Flinks focuses more on open banking data than payments, but their infrastructure overlaps with e-Transfer API use cases, particularly for account verification and payment initiation.
None of Stripe, Square, or Shopify Payments provide direct Interac e-Transfer API access. If you want Request Money with reconciliation, you need one of these Canadian intermediaries or a direct integration with your bank's business banking API — which most banks offer for larger enterprise customers.
Fees: The Real Advantage Over Card Processing
This is where e-Transfer for Business becomes compelling for the right merchant type.
Standard card processing through Stripe, Helcim, or Square runs 1.5–2.9% of the transaction value. On a $5,000 invoice, that's $75–$145 in fees. On a $25,000 invoice, it's $375–$725.
Interac e-Transfer Business fees through VoPay or Apaylo typically run $0.10–$0.50 per transaction, regardless of amount. That $25,000 invoice costs $0.50 to collect. The math is stark for high-value, low-volume B2B transactions.
There's a catch: your customers need to use Canadian banks. e-Transfer only works within the Canadian financial system — no international customers, no US bank accounts. And you eat the fee on the merchant side (unlike card processing where it's also your cost, but psychologically it feels different when you're paying $0.50 vs seeing 2.5% disappear).
Per-Bank Business Limits (2026)
These are approximate figures — banks update limits and don't always publicize exact caps. Confirm with your institution's business banking team before designing a workflow around a specific limit:
- TD Bank (Business): Up to $25,000 per transfer for business accounts; daily limits negotiable with TD Commercial
- RBC (Business): $25,000 per transfer on most business banking tiers
- Scotiabank (Business): $25,000 per transfer standard business limit
- BMO (Business): $25,000 per transfer on business accounts
- Credit Unions: Limits vary significantly — Vancity, Meridian, and Desjardins have different caps; call your branch
The Manual e-Transfer Trap
A lot of Canadian small businesses collect payments via e-Transfer the hard way: they post their email address, wait for a notification, manually verify the memo field matches the right invoice, then mark it paid in their accounting software. This works at low volume. It falls apart as soon as you have more than 10–15 transactions a week.
The failure modes: customers use the wrong email, typo the amount, send with an ambiguous memo. You deposit money you can't match to an invoice. You miss a payment because two e-Transfers arrived on the same day and you counted one twice. Manual reconciliation error rates go up with volume.
Business e-Transfer with API reconciliation eliminates these errors. The Request Money flow — where you initiate the request — means you control the amount, the reference, and the timing. The customer just approves or declines.
What Changes When RTR Launches
Payments Canada's Real-Time Rail (RTR) is expected to launch in late 2026. When it does, the underlying infrastructure for real-time Canadian payments will shift significantly. Interac e-Transfer for Business is essentially the current best-in-class real-time payment option for Canadian merchants; RTR will offer a newer, potentially faster alternative.
For most merchants, the practical implication is: set up e-Transfer for Business now if the economics make sense, and expect that your API provider (VoPay, Apaylo, etc.) will offer an RTR integration path when it's available. You won't need to rebuild your payment workflow from scratch — just adapt the integration layer.
The broader point: Interac e-Transfer for Business is not a short-term workaround. It's the primary real-time B2B payment option in Canada as of 2026 and will remain relevant alongside RTR for years.