Why Canadian payments platform Moneris is being sold to U.S. private equity

Canadian commercial solutions and payment processing platform Moneris will soon have a new owner in an American private equity firm.

Moneris, one of Canada’s largest commerce solutions providers, is jointly owned by the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada. American private equity firm Francisco Partners, which specializes in dealing with technology companies, will buy the platform for $2 billion, Moneris said in a statement.

RBC and BMO will each get a 50 per cent share from the Moneris sale. Both banks saw their shares jump on Monday.

Partnering with the U.S. private equity firm will help Moneris “broaden the wide choice of solutions, support and experiences we deliver to businesses, said James Hicks, president and CEO at Moneris.

Francisco Partners is promising “continued investment in innovation, platform expansion and long-term growth, while preserving the deeply Canadian identity that has made Moneris a market leader,” said Peter Christodoulo, a partner at Francisco Partners.

Moneris is key for businesses across Canada, helping them accept and manage payments across 325,000 points of commerce in the country.

This came just days after U.S. chipmaking giant AMD said it would acquire Taalas, one of Canada’s largest semiconductor manufacturers.

Taalas can produce technology that has “highly optimized AI inference capabilities,” AMD said.

In September 2025, dozens of public figures and tech experts warned Prime Minister Mark Carney about the growing influence of U.S. tech giants on the lives of Canadians. They urged Carney to prepare a roadmap to safeguard Canada’s “digital sovereignty.”

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“Canada must legislate a sovereignty framework before engaging in binding international commitments that could otherwise embed foreign governance logics into our infrastructure,” the open letter warned Carney.

The country must not accept the “unquestioned and unchallenged technological dominance” of the U.S. and “all the harms this entails,” the letter added.

According to a recent report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, three U.S. tech firms — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — own 85 per cent of public cloud market share in Canada.

The federal government said earlier this year that it is looking to build a “sovereign AI foundation” in Canada. This includes the building of a “world-leading public supercomputer” in Canada and the construction of large‑scale AI data centres “that can scale to at least 100 megawatts.”

Canadians who were hoping for more action on that front would be “frustrated” by the news of the Moneris sale, said Concordia University economist Moshe Lander.

“It’s a headline grabber. It’s a financial product and it’s one of those signs that we’re still really tied at the hip to the U.S.,” he said.

Canadian firms looking to scale up often realize that they hit a ceiling unless backed up by American capital, which has more capacity to scale up, he said.

“A Canadian firm that’s looking to set up billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure investment has to think that they’ve got to have access to the U.S. market and the Mexican market if they want any chance of spreading those fixed costs over as many users as possible,” Lander added.

However, he added that the Moneris sale is not necessarily indicative of a larger trend.

“Canada has a trade surplus right now. We’re a net exporter. So, on a net basis, we are acquiring more foreign assets than they (foreign investors) are acquiring of ours,” he added.

According to Statistics Canada, there are $10,467 billion worth of foreign assets owned by Canadians, while Canada’s international liabilities amount to $8,611.3 billion.

However, most of Canada’s foreign assets are still tied to the U.S., with the American market alone accounting for 58.9 per cent of Canada’s foreign financial assets.

“The Canadian finance industry is supervised here in Canada and it’s applied to all firms that operate in Canada,” he said.

“If you’re going to continue to operate in Canada, you still have to submit to Canadian law rules and regulations,” Lander added.