EXCLUSIVE: “Staying Real” – Ramon Caracas and Debra LePage, Payment Spayce in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

Payment Spayce has been quietly building resilient real-time payments integrations for years. Now it’s ready to help businesses in Barbados ride the new RTP rail there

Canadian banks have deep and historic roots in Barbados. RBC Royal Bank and Scotiabank have operated on the island for decades. Compliance culture, supervisory philosophy and operational frameworks connect the two markets more closely than many realise. And 2026 will be a significant year for both of them.

That’s when the two jurisdictions enter a new era of real-time payments (RTP) almost in parallel, and with it comes a new era of risk management for financial services. Speed has always been the most seductive promise in payments, from the introduction of telegraphic transfers to transitioning from paper-based transactions to electronic Automated Clearing House (ACH) networks. But the arrival of RTP rails has been a seismic shift: governments are modernising their infrastructure and their rules, banks are rethinking oversight, and fintechs are positioning themselves at the centre of compliance.

This year, Canada’s long-awaited Real-Time Rail (RTR), overseen by Payments Canada, will deliver 24/7 instant, data-rich account-to-account transfers, while Barbados’ BiMPay initiative, led by the Central Bank of Barbados, will transform domestic payments with instant clearing and settlement. For payment facilitators, this change of mindset and technology provides tangible opportunities. And that’s something Barbados-based Payment Spayce has had experience of before.

It’s been building real-time capability in North America behind the scenes for years. And its approach has been consistently straightforward: when settlement shrinks to seconds, compliance cannot be an afterthought. The company’s origins were in traditional rails.

“We were doing ACH with banks in the US, providing payment services, withdrawing and depositing funds into people’s accounts – commercial accounts as well,” says co-founder Ramon Caracas.

But while ACH is reliable, predictable and well understood, it is not instant, and, working directly with sponsoring banks, Caracas says the company gained insight into product development conversations to take transactions to the next level.

“We had multiple sponsoring banks where we had a peek behind the curtain in regards to certain products or services that they weren’t able to develop,” he explains. “As a technology company, we were able to take a look at what they were not pushing out. They gave us the opportunity to pilot different programmes.”

Evolving the infrastructure

The United States is a useful reference point for real-time payments infrastructure. The Clearing House launched its RTP network in 2017, introducing instant, irrevocable settlement among participating banks. In 2023, the Federal Reserve followed with FedNow, expanding coverage further. Adoption has required deep changes in the financial industry – from liquidity management to fraud monitoring to treasury operations and redefined partnerships.

“When we built out the RTP system for a bank, we became their tech partner in that department,” says Caracas. “What we were able to offer was seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days out of the year.”

That distinction matters. Real-time capability is not simply about faster clearing. It’s about operational continuity. Liquidity must be available at any time of the day or night. Fraud monitoring must operate at the weekends. Customer service cannot switch off. For certain merchants, particularly those in sectors where speed is competitive, this alters the landscape entirely.

“For a lot of our clients where speed is important, it changed their offer towards their clients,” Caracas adds. “They were able to start changing how they market themselves to gain more clients and separate themselves from their competition.”

If Caracas frames the company’s growth through product capability, Co-founder Debra LePage frames it through risk discipline.

“I come from a background of compliance and banking,” she says. “But my passion is really sales and product innovation. There’s no sale that’s too great to ever compromise compliance.”

Instant payments compresses the window for intervention. Once funds are sent, they are gone. There is no batch file to halt. No opportunity to correct errors. Fraud must be detected before or during the transaction – not after the proverbial horse has bolted. LePage understands that only too well. To illustrate, she describes mentoring an intern who wanted to learn the business.

“I threw her into compliance to understand what the backend takes from an underwriting perspective when an application comes in, all the way up to walking that client through, to integration,” recalls LePage. “That way, she got to understand the system – it became her sales tool – really understanding that whole full-flow process.

“Speaking from my own perspective, I understand what compliance is looking for. When a customer comes in, I prep them on what they need to supply ahead of time. It takes away a lot of back and forth and speeds up the process.”

Instant improvements

Barbados’ BiMPay will be launched in two phases, with the main financial institutions and the island’s stock exchange being the first participants. The big banks include First Citizens Bank, RBC Royal Bank, Republic Bank, Sagicor Bank and Scotiabank. Fintechs will follow in the second phase. BiMPay first aims to fix the current fragmented infrastructure, whereby current systems suffer from interoperability issues, leading to delays and high costs for transactions between different financial institutions.

Secondly, BiMPay will allow users to send and receive money in real-time (within seconds) 24/7/365, with immediate access to funds – a major upgrade over the current ACH, which can take days.

The system also promotes financial inclusion, being accessible to everyone, even those without traditional bank accounts, by allowing for digital wallets that connect to the system. It will increase efficiency and lower costs for consumers and businesses by facilitating direct, instant transfers, and improving cash flow. And finally, the instantaneous system, which will use aliases (such as phone numbers or email addresses) or QR codes to make payments faster and easier, will keep pace with Barbados’ wider shift towards digital channels. Direct electronic transfers in the country have expanded by more than 700 per cent in the last decade.

Meanwhile, Canada’s Real-Time Rail initiative is also more than a technical upgrade. It sits alongside the implementation of the Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA), which introduces a supervisory framework for payment service providers that hold end-user funds. Under the regime, overseen by the Bank of Canada, PSPs must safeguard funds appropriately, maintain operational risk frameworks and comply with reporting obligations.

There is the all-too sobering realisation that anti-fraud precautions need to match the pace of this transformation. Fraud prevention in a real-time ecosystem cannot rely on manual review. Instead, velocity checks, sanctions screening, behavioural modelling and transaction monitoring must operate in milliseconds. That puts Payment Spayce and its technology in prime position in Barbados.

At last year’s Money20/20 USA, Payment Spayce announced a partnership with Israeli regtech firm ThetaRay to further reinforce its infrastructure for the real-time era. The integration embeds AI-driven transaction monitoring into the company’s gateway at a time when financial crime networks are becoming more sophisticated and agile, operating with the complexity of multinational corporations.

“Our customers – from SMEs to enterprise clients – are seeing reduced compliance friction, faster transaction approval times, and a higher degree of confidence in their cross-border activity. It’s helping them move money smarter and safer,” says LePage. “It’s all done in under a second. It doesn’t slow down any transaction. It speeds up the ability to intake a lot more.”

Payment Spayce says it can push payments safely into more than 170 countries, the majority in real time.

“I think what customers love the most is the speed of the transaction,” continues LePage. “For gig economy workers who are reliant on a vendor payment, they don’t want to be waiting three or four weeks to receive their money.

“With our system, those payments are now virtually instantaneous.”

Canada’s implementation of the Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA) has forced a structural reckoning across the payments landscape. For some providers, that has meant revisiting internal controls. For others, it has meant rethinking governance. For Spayce, it meant altering the architecture of the business itself.

“We looked at where the market was heading and decided we didn’t want to sit on the sidelines,” says LePage

“So we acquired a regulated trust company in Canada and integrated it into our product suite, so now we’re a financial entity in that jurisdiction. It’s not something you can easily acquire anymore – especially in Canada.”

In an environment where banks themselves face heightened scrutiny around third-party risk, alignment with a provider that can demonstrate regulatory maturity like that reduces exposure. It was important that the company’s move was proactive rather than reactive, says LePage.

“We wanted to be ahead of the curve. “Banks are under pressure,” she adds. “They need partners who understand governance, who understand reporting, who understand accountability. It’s not optional anymore. And it’s no longer defensive. It’s competitive.”

The logic is straightforward. Payments sit at the centre of everything. As one industry maxim puts it: ‘if you don’t take a payment, you don’t get to revenue; if you don’t get to revenue, you don’t get to profit; if you don’t get to profit, you don’t get to cash’.

“Payments are foundational,” LePage says. “If that layer isn’t solid, everything above it is exposed. Compliance ultimately becomes commercial capital. It opens doors.”

A transformational change

Barbados’ transition to instant payment rails touches consumers and small businesses directly. mMoney, currently the leading digital wallet application on the island, has approximately 20,000 consumers and 2,000 merchants registered, out of a total population of around 280,000 people. This and future wallets will be able to operate over BiMPay, which will reduce the cost of banking for thousands of businesses and consumers. But such transformation, LePage cautions, is rarely immediate.

“Everything comes with baby steps,” she says. “There’s going to be that learning curve. [But] faster access to funds matters. For small businesses, especially, that timing can make a real difference. The counterweight to that is that speed increases exposure. So, education has to move alongside infrastructure.”

Caracas frames Payment Spayce’s client philosophy in deliberately human terms, emphasising that cold, hard technology will only take you so far. A consumer has to feel the interaction, rather than just experience it.

“Everybody’s important,” he says. “Big or small, everybody gets treated the same. We really heavily rely on feedback from the clients and our partners. It’s never finished, and you’re always refining. This is how we improve ourselves.

“We know that customer experience is more than interface design. It’s onboarding clarity. It’s responsiveness. It’s system reliability. It’s what happens after settlement.”

LePage agrees that Spayce’s development model is collaborative. “We ask clients all the time: what would you change, what would you add?” she says. “Not every request is actioned, but when you see the same themes coming up again and again, you pay attention.”

Banks, she says, are recalibrating their approach and, as a potential partner, Payment Spayce is stepping up to the plate.

“They’re not interested in building out full tech teams anymore. It’s cheaper to partner with somebody like us. For that to work, vendor due diligence is intense. You have to demonstrate operational resilience. You have to demonstrate transparency. It’s strategic alignment. You’re becoming part of someone’s ecosystem.”

Evolving partnerships

Spayce’s consistent annual growth has been driven largely by referrals, not by aggressive marketing. LePage reaches for a familiar analogy when describing the paytech’s position in the market: the scenario of David and Goliath springs to mind.

“I think we’re David,” she says. “But infrastructure changes create competitive openings. When systems modernise, relationships get reconsidered. Qualification criteria evolve.”

Real-time rails adoption in both Canada and Barbados may represent just such an inflexion point.

“It’s a reset moment,” LePage agrees. “People are reassessing who they want to work with.”

For all the discussion of regulation, rails and risk, LePage returns repeatedly to the end user. The ideal payment experience, she argues, is invisible.

“They don’t care about infrastructure,” she says. “They care about completion: secure, seamless, frictionless. That’s the goal. “You’re ultimately balancing immediacy with identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance checks. You’re simplifying without compromising. When they work perfectly, they’re invisible. When they fail, they’re headline news.”

In the parallel modernisation of Canadian and Barbadian central payment systems, speed is no longer the differentiator; it’s the baseline. What separates providers in this real-time environment, LePage argues, is resilience.

“It’s safeguarding of funds, robustness of monitoring, clarity of onboarding, regulatory alignment. Money now moves in seconds. Accountability moves just as quickly.

“You can’t fake readiness. In real time, everything shows.”

---

This article was published in The Paytech Magazine Issue #18, Page 24-26

The post EXCLUSIVE: “Staying Real” – Ramon Caracas and Debra LePage, Payment Spayce in ‘The Paytech Magazine’ appeared first on FF News | Fintech Finance.