BessPay's Demo Presentation | Day 1 @Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City : Watch on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUZZFzAkMRk
Overview
Between July and November 2025, the BessPay team continued building toward a simple but ambitious goal: enabling micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to get paid quickly, affordably and reliably in their local currency through Open Payments. The BessPay Plugin is being built as a wallet-agnostic Open Payments client for Sharetribe marketplaces, so marketplace owners, sellers and buyers can connect the Interledger wallets that work best for them, without being locked into any single provider.
This period was defined by a major technical realignment, a successful live demo at the Interledger Foundation Summit, and steady progress on research, marketplace design and regulatory planning. On November 5, 2025, the team presented a live demo of the BessPay Plugin at the ILF Summit, showing how the system works end to end in a real marketplace context.
Refocusing on Open Payments, End to End
One of BessPay’s central objectives is to deliver a Sharetribe plugin that acts as a clean, standards-aligned Open Payments client. Over this reporting period, the team re-architected the solution around the official Open Payments TypeScript/Node SDK, with BessPay explicitly taking the role of client and licensed Interledger Account Servicing Entities (ASEs) acting as the regulated fund-holders.
This required stripping out older, Stripe-centric assumptions from the Sharetribe architecture and removing vendor-specific coupling. In their place, the team implemented flows that allow marketplace owners, sellers and buyers to connect any compatible Interledger wallet via payment pointer. The result is a wallet-agnostic integration where BessPay orchestrates payments while compliant ASEs actually hold and move funds. This redesigned client integration is already working and has been tested in a live demo environment.
Building a Reference Marketplace: GSPEN Marketplace
To demonstrate the plugin in a concrete, real-world setting, BessPay is developing the GSPEN Marketplace as its primary reference implementation. This marketplace is focused on digital goods and remote services-creative work, software, online events and similar offerings-where funds can flow without requiring regulated escrow at this first stage.
During the reporting period, the team defined the initial scope for the GSPEN Marketplace and integrated the BessPay Plugin into a Sharetribe template built in collaboration with Journey Horizon, Sharetribe’s premier implementation partner. Data models, onboarding flows and transaction views were aligned with BessPay’s Open Payments logic so the marketplace can fully showcase how Open Payments works in practice. The foundations are now in place, with marketplace launch and MSME onboarding planned for the next reporting period.
Grounding the Design in MSME Reality
Another core objective is to ensure that BessPay responds to real MSME and marketplace needs rather than abstract assumptions. To support this, the team completed a pilot research study combining a focused literature review with structured surveys of sellers, buyers and a marketplace operator.
The findings reinforce the importance of what BessPay is trying to solve. MSMEs are already digitally active, but they face high fees, slow settlement times and limited cross-border options. Respondents consistently emphasised that speed, cost, trust and buyer protection strongly influence their payment choices. They also highlighted the importance of mobile-first user experiences, especially in bandwidth-constrained and mobile-centric regions. These insights are now shaping product decisions, particularly around user experience, refunds, dispute resolution and the later rollout of escrow.
Planning the Path to Escrow and Licensing
Looking ahead, BessPay is designing a phased path toward becoming a regulated provider that can offer Escrow-as-a-Service (EaaS). During this period, the team analysed different escrow options and concluded that per-transaction sub-accounts are the long-term best practice for auditability and user trust.
On top of this technical view, a regulatory roadmap is taking shape. In the short term, BessPay remains strictly an Open Payments client, with no fund-holding. In the medium term, the team plans to pursue PSP/e-money and escrow licensing in priority markets, leveraging regulatory sandboxes where possible. In the longer term, the goal is to expand escrow and wallet services across the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and other ILF regions. This strategy is now being refined, with regulatory engagement and licensing conversations planned for upcoming phases.
What the Team Built: Core Features and Demo
Figure 1: High Level Architecture
From a feature perspective, July to November was an intense build period. The team implemented the Open Payments client integration with the official SDK and built a Marketplace Owner Dashboard where marketplace operators can connect and verify ASE wallets, configure their fee percentages and split rules, and view early transaction metrics such as sales, fees and volumes.
On the user side, new seller onboarding flows now allow sellers to register, connect payment pointers or wallets, and complete KYC/KYB with their chosen ASE. Buyer onboarding and checkout flows enable buyers to create accounts, optionally link wallets and pay through Open Payments without needing to understand every technical detail underneath. Behind the scenes, BessPay coordinates the Open Payments resources needed for the transaction.
Figure 2: Marketplace Owner Dashboard
The plugin now supports split-payment logic for marketplace fees-for example, directing 97% of a payment to the seller and 3% to the marketplace-within a single coordinated Open Payments flow. Transaction history views for marketplace owners, sellers and buyers give each group the visibility they need into sales and payouts.
Figure 3: Automated Split Fee Payments in Checkout Flow
Strengthening Strategy, Team and Partnerships
Alongside the product work, the team also pushed forward on strategy and partnerships. The MSME pilot research stream was completed, capturing the UX and business requirements that are now feeding into design decisions and further research rollout. Escrow and licensing research advanced in parallel, mapping likely regulatory pathways and the jurisdictions that make the most sense for BessPay’s future as an ASE in the Interledger ecosystem.
Internally, BessPay consolidated a multi-disciplinary team spanning engineering, QA, research, project management, business development and design. Externally, the project deepened its collaboration with Journey Horizon, Sharetribe, the Interledger Foundation technical team and early ASE partners, including Chimoney and others in ILF ASE regions. These relationships are proving critical for both technical correctness and practical adoption.
Communications and Marketing
Telling the Story and Preparing for MSME Outreach
Communications and marketing efforts in this period focused primarily on visibility within the Interledger ecosystem and preparation for MSME-facing outreach. At Interledger Summit 2025, the team not only delivered the live demo but also participated in the Grantee Showcase, where community members could test the flows and ask in-depth questions.
A video interview with ILF was also recorded to explain BessPay’s vision, technical approach and expected impact, and informal networking during the event opened doors with ASEs, marketplace operators and potential pilot partners. Back home, the team began drafting user-friendly guides, FAQs and onboarding materials aimed at marketplace owners and MSMEs. These resources will explain what Open Payments is, how to connect an Interledger wallet, and how fees and payouts work within the BessPay model. In the next period, communications will shift more towards recruiting MSMEs, telling pilot stories and co-marketing with ASEs and marketplace partners.
The Road Ahead: December 2025 to February 2026
Looking forward, the next three months are about finalising the MVP, bringing the GSPEN Marketplace fully online, and laying deeper foundations for support and regulation.
On the product side, the team plans to implement a price-and-currency confirmation modal using Open Payments quote data, tighten error handling and validation for multi-currency and split-payment scenarios, and complete the backend transaction lifecycle so pending, failed and expired states are handled gracefully. Wallet and payment pointer validation will be strengthened, and integration with emerging wallet verification and single sign-on patterns recommended by ILF will be explored to further reduce fraud and increase trust.
On the marketplace front, work will continue on Open Payments checkout for Sharetribe’s Android and iOS mobile apps, alongside deployment of the GSPEN Marketplace for web and mobile users. An initial cohort of MSMEs will be onboarded as sellers across ILF ASE regions, and structured pilots will be run to measure transaction success, settlement times, user satisfaction and key impact metrics.
To better serve MSMEs, BessPay will publish owner and seller guides with clear, step-by-step instructions, integrate a KYB provider into the dashboard to verify marketplace owners, and put in place basic observability and support systems such as logging, monitoring and ticketing. On the regulatory side, research and early conversations will continue in priority jurisdictions across the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa, with a view to designing the practical steps toward Escrow-as-a-Service and an eventual ILF-enabled BessPay wallet after licensing.
Finally, the team will focus on turning Summit interest into concrete pilots, co-marketing campaigns and integration opportunities with ASEs and marketplaces, while preparing a funding and scale-up proposal to ILF and selected financial and development partners for a 2026 production rollout.
How the Community Can Help
The Interledger and broader open payments community has a significant role to play in the next chapter of BessPay. Additional ASEs and wallets willing to integrate and participate in pilots will help prove out the plugin’s wallet-agnostic promise. Marketplace operators and MSME networks ready to run pilots in ILF ASE regions can bring real sellers and buyers into the ecosystem and demonstrate the impact of Open Payments on the ground.
Regulatory and compliance experts-especially those with experience in PSP/e-money, escrow and cross-border payments in the Caribbean and African markets-can help BessPay navigate the licensing landscape wisely. Communicators and storytellers across the community can assist in sharing demo recordings, results, success stories and partnership opportunities through ILF channels and beyond.
Closing
Throughout this period, BessPay has remained aligned with the Interledger Foundation’s mission to make payments more open, inclusive and interoperable, particularly for MSMEs in climate-vulnerable and historically under-served economies across the Global South. The team is committed to delivering a robust, standards-first Open Payments client that lowers the barrier for marketplaces to adopt interoperable payments, using the GSPEN Marketplace as a living lab to refine MSME-focused payment experiences, and sharing what is learned with other builders in the ecosystem.
The project team is grateful for the continued support, feedback and collaboration from ILF staff, fellows, grantees and community members, and looks forward to making the next phase even more collaborative, practical and impactful.
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