🥈On February 4th, along with Alice Nguyen, Johnny Hu, and Stephanie Li , we had the opportunity to present at the Design Exchange in Toronto alongside six other finalist teams from across Canada and were honored to receive national 2nd place at the Interac × TECHNATION U-Innovate Challenge.
We focused on one big question:
💡As the landscape shifts toward agentic commerce, how can Interac empower the way people connect, collaborate, and transact in a digital world?
Our solution proposed an agentic, in-chat checkout experience powered by Konek, Interac’s e-commerce payment solution, to enable seamless payments within agentic AI while preserving bank-backed verification and user control.
The solution came from rounds of discussion as we worked to understand the transaction cycle end-to-end: how payments flow, who the key players are, and where value and risk sit across the system. At the same time, we explored what agentic AI can actually do in commerce, and pushed ourselves to think forward about how this shift could reshape daily life for Canadians.
A huge thank you to Interac Corp. and
TECHNATION for organizing such an amazing event, and to the judges: Debbie Gamble, ICD.D, Sandi Campbell, Vasiliki (Vass) B., Sudha Dwivedi, BA, MBA, CPCC, and Mario Falvo, CPA CA CRM, who generously devoted their time and challenged us with thoughtful questions.
One of the most exciting moments was learning that Interac’s Innovation team has been exploring similar directions internally. That validation made the experience even more meaningful. Conversations with James Lucas, Eric Sotkowy, Michelle Cochrane, Iroj Gurung, Steevens Rouyard, and Shilpa Arora gave us a more well-rounded view of where the payments landscape is headed and getting to know the people actively shaping it. As a young Canadian who interacts with the transaction system every day, I’m genuinely excited to keep learning from this space, and to see what the future of payments in Canada looks like next!
