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31| W aterloo C hronicle | T hursday,June 28,2018 w aterloochronicle.ca From the latest information on local politics, to minor sports scores and what's going on down the street, get it all online. CURRENT. COMMUNITY. CONNECTED www.waterloochronicle.ca BUSINESS Visit waterloochronicle.ca for more coverage Interac, the payment brand used by Canadians an average of 16 million times per day, is the latest tenant to join Communi- tech's corporate innovation space. The launch held last week at the Communitech Hub briefly looked back on the company's evolution, beginning with various it- erations of debit in the late 1980s. Today, people can tap their bank cards and mo- bile devices to make pur- chases in stores and can pay their rent or make other payments with e-Transfer. On June 1, Interac re- ported a record two million e-Transfer transactions in one day, with the use of ser- vice increasing at a rate of 50 per cent year-over-year. "Opening the Interac Lab positions the company to continue to evolve as the payments sphere changes," said Debbie Gamble, the company's vice president of digital products and plat- forms. "Our role here is to con- tinue our innovation jour- ney, and what better place to do that than in Kitche- ner-Waterloo. You've got the second largest startup com- munity in the world, you've got an incredible set of cor- porations that are partici- pating in the innovation space, and probably most important, you have the ac- ademic entities." Tricia Gruetzmacher, di- rector of the Interac Lab, said she's planning to look at a variety of products to see what Interac can build upon. "Looking at one of the projects we have in a demo right now for public con- sumption coming is e- Transfer APIs (application programming interfaces)," she said. For example, some land- lords receive thousands of e-transfers from tenants and would like a web appli- cation tool to keep track of payments, Gruetzmacher said. "That's just one of the small things we can do." Interac participated in a hack-a-thon at the begin- ning of the year and hosted a Collision Day at Commu- nitech in 2017, offering cash prizes. Both programs pro- vided access to a beta-ver- sion of Interac e-Transfer Public API, allowing partic- ipants to build on the plat- form. "We had amazing results from that challenge," Gam- ble said. "We'll also be looking at some new technologies - it might be voice, blockchain or how we leverage artifi- cial intelligence. What do we think about the future of quantum technology or cryptography to continue to provide secure capabili- ties?" Interac's headquarters in downtown Toronto em- ploys just under of 300 peo- ple, and this is the compa- ny's first outpost. The lab will operate with two full- time staff members and two rotating co-op students to start. It joins 13 other compa- nies and organizations with labs at Communitech, in- cluding General Motors, TD Canada Trust, the LCBO, the province of On- tario and the Workplace Safety Insurance Board. "As an arm of the bigger team back in Toronto, this is an opportunity not just to collaborate with the start- up community here, but the other corporate partners at Communitech, so we can think big and leverage the assets we have. But perhaps think outside of the box, which is typically a bit more challenging back in the head office," Gruetzmacher said. "Here we want to test those smaller concepts be- fore we go, 'OK, put it back into headquarters and fig- ure out how to really bring that to market full-scale, for every province, every Ca- nadian and in every lan- guage that we have in Cana- da," Gamble said. "We want to give back as well," she noted. "We want to be able to share every- thing that works within here and contribute to that collaborative practice." Interac taps into Communitech Tricia Gruetzmacher (right), director of Interac's new innovation lab at Communitech, celebrates with Debbie Gamble, Interac's vice president of digital products and platforms, at a kick-off event June 19, 2018. Bill Jackson/Metroland Payment brand looking into the evolution of fintech BILL JACKSON bjackson@kitchenerpost.ca