Canadian Payments Association

The CPA, or Canadian Payments Association operates national clearing and settlement systems that facilitate this flow of funds between institutions and mitigate risk to payment system participants. On average, some 22 million payment items, representing approximately $203 billion in transactions, were cleared and settled through the CPA’s systems each business day during 2008. These include cheques, wire transfers, direct deposits, pre-authorized debits, bill payments, point-of-sale debits and online payments. Note that transactions charged to credit cards are not cleared through CPA systems, and thus CPA Rules do not apply to them.