Three numbers from the last earnings season, and then I’ll get to the point.
Rogers reported its third quarter on October 23, 2026. Postpaid churn was 1.03 percent, up from 0.99 percent a year earlier. Postpaid net additions were 6,000. A year ago they were 62,000. Revenue per mobile phone user slipped to $55.22 from $56.70, and the chief financial officer said the CRTC’s fee ban had the largest impact on that number.
Telus reported its second quarter on July 31. Churn rose to 1.08 percent from 1.06 percent, mobile net additions were 17,000, down 38,000 from the same quarter last year, and the company blamed the churn on promotional pricing wars. It also said it was deliberately chasing fewer, more profitable customers.
I keep both of those on my desk because they say the quiet part out loud. The two biggest wireless companies in the country have stopped trying to win the market on volume. Growth, where it exists, now comes from keeping the people you already have and getting a little more from each of them. That’s a retention business. And in a retention business the question is where the retention actually happens.
The exit door is open and the regulator wants a sign on it
Here’s why November 2026 is a strange time to be running a Canadian telco.
On March 12, 2026 the CRTC issued Telecom Regulatory Policy 2026-43, effective June 12. Activation fees, plan change fees and early cancellation fees on contracts without a subsidized device are gone, for every wireless provider and every home internet provider under the Internet Code. The stated purpose is to remove the fees that stop people from switching plans. Rogers started charging a $40 device setup fee and a SIM fee in mid-June, and the CRTC is now reviewing whether that counts.
Then on April 13, 2027, Telecom Regulatory Policy 2026-67 takes effect. Ninety days before a contract or a long promotion ends, you have to tell the customer, in their chosen channel, that the end is coming, that they can leave without penalty, and where the plans they could buy are. With a link. And you keep a copy.
Read those two together. The regulator removed the cost of leaving in June and will require you to announce the leaving date next April. Your best customers will each get a personal reminder, from you, that this is the moment to shop around.
I don’t think that’s a disaster. I think it’s the clearest retention brief any carrier has ever been handed. You already know the date. You already know the channel. The only question is what you say.
Where retention doesn’t live
Most carriers would answer that question with the CRM. A win-back campaign, a loyalty offer, a save desk that calls when the churn model lights up.
I spent 26 years in digital marketing before this job, and I can tell you what those campaigns reach. A fraction of the base, on a good day, in a channel the customer didn’t ask for. I covered the open-rate gap in August, so I won’t rerun the numbers. The short version is that the bill gets opened by almost everyone, every month, and read more carefully than anything marketing will ever send.
So the retention asset is already in the mail. The problem is what’s printed on it.
A passive bill is a receipt. It reports what happened last month, in the vocabulary of the billing system, and the only action it offers is a phone number. Everything the customer might want to do with it, question a charge, change the plan, see what their promo turns into, pay, happens somewhere else, after a search, in another system, usually with a wait.
An active bill is a different object. Same number, same date, same legal content. Four things change.
It explains itself. Every line has a plain reason next to it, in the words a person would use, not the rate plan code. A tax line that changed because the area code and the billing address disagree says so. A proration says what it prorated.
It carries the next step. If the promotion ends in 90 days, the bill says so, shows the two plans that fit this customer’s actual usage, and lets them switch from the statement. That’s the CRTC notice, written as an offer instead of a warning, three months before it’s required.
It takes the payment. The amount, the reference and the link are in the message, and the confirmation comes back tied to the bill it settled. When the Real-Time Rail starts carrying volume next year, that confirmation arrives in seconds.
It arrives with the fix already made. If a charge was wrong, the credit is on this bill, with one line that says why, instead of on the next bill after the customer called.
None of that is a feature of the billing system. The billing system should bill. It’s the layer between billing and the customer, the one that decides what gets said, checks it, and remembers what went out. That’s what hiperCCM is for, and it’s the part most CCM platforms in Canada were never asked to do.
The catch, and it’s the whole thing
An active bill only works if the number is right.
I’m not going to rerun the complaint numbers here either. The CCTS annual report in January said billing was 46 percent of every complaint it took, and the mid-year report in April said complaints were up 61 percent. The first article this month is about what that does to churn, so I’ll leave it there.
The point for this piece is simpler. If you put an offer, a payment link and a plan comparison on a statement that’s wrong, you’ve made a personalized mistake with a buy button on it. Validate first. Every line, against the contract, before the statement exists. That’s hiperValidation, and it’s why the order of the two products matters.
Banco Carrefour is the proof I use. About 5 million personalized communications a month go out through the bill, and every one of them passes a full data check first. The bill is the channel because the bill is trusted, and it’s trusted because nothing wrong goes out on it.
What I’d do before April
Four things, in order.
Put the contract end date and the promotion end date on the bill now, for every customer, as a plain sentence. You’ll need it by April 13 anyway, and the carriers that get there early get to write it as an offer rather than a compliance line.
Replace the “questions about your bill” box with the action. Change plan, dispute a line, pay, pick a channel. If the customer can’t do it from the statement, the statement sent them to the call centre, and the call centre is where churn gets decided.
Move the credit forward. Any error your validation catches should be fixed on the bill it would have appeared on, with the explanation attached. A credit that arrives before the complaint is a retention event. A credit that arrives after the call is a refund.
Measure bill-driven actions as a retention metric. Plan changes from the statement, payments from the statement, disputes resolved on the statement. Those numbers tell you whether the most-opened message you send is doing any work.
The regulator has set the date. The earnings calls have set the stakes. The bill is already in the customer’s hands.
If you’d like to see what an active bill looks like with your own data in it, Request a Demo (https://fastmovn.com/en/home/#request-a-demo).
Fast Movn is a Canadian technology company based in Vancouver, BC. Our platform pairs hiperValidation, which checks 100 percent of billing data before it reaches the customer, with hiperCCM, which turns the bill into a personalized, multichannel conversation. We work with telecom, financial services and utility companies across Brazil and North America.
Sources
– BNN Bloomberg (The Canadian Press), “Rogers seeks to offset hit from CRTC fee ban as wireless service revenue dips in Q3,” October 23, 2026 (postpaid churn 1.03 percent vs 0.99 percent; postpaid net additions 6,000 vs 62,000; mobile phone ARPU $55.22 vs $56.70; $40 device setup fee and SIM fee from mid-June; CRTC review). https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2026/10/23/rogers-seeks-to-offset-hit-from-crtc-fee-ban-as-wireless-service-revenue-dips-in-q3/
– Rogers Communications, third quarter 2026 results, October 23, 2026. https://about.rogers.com/wp-content/uploads/Rogers-Q3-2026-Press-Release.pdf
– iPhone in Canada, “Telus slashes dividend 55% as Q2 losses hit massive $1.8 billion,” July 31, 2026 (churn 1.08 percent from 1.06 percent; net additions 17,000, down 38,000; promo pricing wars; fewer, more profitable customers). https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2026/07/31/telus-slashes-dividend-55-as-q2-losses-hit-massive-1-8-billion/
– CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy 2026-43, March 12, 2026, effective June 12, 2026 (activation, modification and early cancellation fees prohibited; wireless and Internet Code providers). https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-43.htm
– CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy 2026-67, April 13, 2026, enforced April 13, 2027 (90-day contract and promotion expiry notices with plan link, chosen channel, copy retained). https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-67.htm
– CCTS, 2024-25 Annual Report, January 14, 2026 (billing 46 percent of issues) and 2025-26 Mid-Year Report, April 29, 2026 (complaints up 61 percent). https://pub.ccts-cprst.ca/2024-2025-annual-report/topics-trends/ and https://www.ccts-cprst.ca/?p=12394
– Payments Canada, Real-Time Rail testing and launch (Q4 2026 first participants, full volumes by Q3 2027). https://www.payments.ca/systems-services/payment-systems/real-time-rail-payment-system/testing-and-launch
– Banco Carrefour and Hiperstream case study (about 5 million personalized communications a month, 100 percent data check), Fast Movn internal.
