Consumers, businesses and banks make millions of payments each day using a variety of instruments, such as debit cards, cheques and wires. Canada is currently developing three new systems to process these transactions: Lynx, Settlement Optimization Engine (SOE) and Real-Time Rail (RTR).

Security is an important element in ensuring public confidence in a central bank digital currency (CBDC). This note highlights the required security properties of a CBDC system and the challenges encountered with existing solutions, should the Bank of Canada choose to issue one.

The Boc–BoE database of sovereign debt defaults, published and updated annually by the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, provides comprehensive estimates of stocks of government obligations in default. The 2020 edition includes a new section examining the scale of domestic arrears in 2018.