Grey Can Now Send Your Money to Canada in Minutes for $3

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Sending money to Canada has always been more expensive and slower than it has any right to be. Wire fees between $15 and $30 on a typical $500 transfer, settlement times measured in days, and a recipient on the other end doing nothing but waiting. That’s been the standard for years, and for the millions of people in Nigeria, India, the Philippines, and across emerging markets who regularly send money to family, pay contractors, or settle business invoices in Canada, there hasn’t been a meaningfully better option. Until now.

Grey, the Y Combinator-backed cross-border payments startup, launched Canadian Dollar transfers on April 7, 2026, allowing its users to send money directly to any Canadian bank account, arriving in minutes via Interac for $3.00, or by the next business day via standard bank transfer for $2.50, with no percentage fee and no wire delays.

The flat fee structure alone undercuts the market significantly, but the more consequential piece of this is the Interac integration. Interac is the payment rail built into the daily financial life of virtually every Canadian bank account holder, the same network used for everyday domestic payments. When Grey settles through Interac, the transfer doesn’t enter a wire queue. It moves the way domestic payments do: fast, confirmed, and predictable. Recipients don’t need a new app or account. The money just arrives. That last point matters more than it sounds. Remittance products have historically lost users not because the sending experience was bad, but because asking a recipient to sign up for something new creates enough friction to kill the product entirely. Grey bypasses that problem entirely by landing funds on infrastructure that Canadians already live inside.

Grey currently serves nearly 3 million users across 70 countries and facilitates transfers to more than 170 destinations worldwide, regulated by FinCEN in the U.S. and FINTRAC in Canada. That regulatory footprint is what makes the Canada product possible, Grey Finance Inc. has been operating as a licensed Money Services Business under FINTRAC oversight from a Vancouver address. This isn’t a company rushing into Canadian compliance to capitalize on a trend. The groundwork was already in place.

The service supports all Canadian banks for both personal and business accounts. Users can send from USD, EUR, GBP, or NGN balances, with individual transaction limits of $10,000 CAD and business limits of up to $100,000 CAD via bank transfer. The business tier is particularly interesting given that Grey launched its B2B product, Grey Business, in February 2026 at the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi. A freelancer in Accra paying a Canadian collaborator and a startup in Lagos settling an invoice with a Toronto agency now have the same compliant, fast path to do it.

A survey by Payments Canada found that one in five Canadians sent money internationally through their Canadian account, up 33% from the previous year. The flow Grey is addressing runs the other direction, from emerging markets into Canada, but the underlying demand signal is the same. Canada’s growing immigrant population and its deep diaspora ties to Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia make this corridor commercially significant and persistently underserved.

CEO Idorenyin Obong, who co-founded Grey with Femi Aghedo in 2020 under the original name Aboki Africa, was direct about where the demand came from: “Canada kept coming up. From Lagos to Mumbai to Manila, our users had someone in Canada they needed to pay, but no good way to do so. Expensive wires, slow settlement, no certainty. We fixed that.”

The Canada launch also arrives at an interesting moment for Interac itself. In September 2025, Interac expanded eligibility to payment service providers registered under the Retail Payment Activities Act and as Money Services Businesses with FINTRAC, opening the door to fintechs that previously had to pay fees to a banking partner to access a limited version of the system. Grey is one of the beneficiaries of that structural change, a regulatory shift that’s making Canada’s payments infrastructure more accessible to non-bank players just as global remittance demand into the country is rising.

Grey has raised $2.5 million in seed funding across two rounds from ten investors, including Y Combinator, Soma Capital, and Ingressive Capital. That number looks modest for a company operating in 70 countries at scale, which raises natural questions about runway and whether a larger raise is coming as Grey expands its B2B ambitions alongside its consumer product. What’s clear for now is that Grey has built a great deal of product and user trust on limited capital, and the Canada launch is one more corridor added to a network that’s been growing steadily across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and North Africa over the past two years.

For the Nigerian engineer supporting a sibling in Ontario, or the Kenyan contractor getting paid by a Vancouver-based client, the math just changed considerably. Three dollars and a few minutes, instead of thirty dollars and three days, is not a minor improvement. It’s the difference between a service people actually use and one they tolerate.