Brief Project Description
FLIQA uses open banking to facilitate direct account-to-account payments, helping businesses cut costs, eliminate intermediaries, and manage finances more efficiently. Users enjoy greater transparency and security with every transaction.
By integrating the Interledger Protocol alongside traditional banking infrastructure, FLIQA advances financial inclusion for SMEs and underserved communities. Through Open Payments APIs, the platform expands payment options and drives interoperability across currencies and ledgers. The result is a secure, low-cost alternative to card- and cash-based systems — making modern payments accessible to everyone while keeping businesses fully in control of their money.
Project update
We have established the foundation to expand our payment integration capabilities, with a particular focus on the Interledger Open Payments standard. This includes building support for additional account types, such as Open Payments accounts and payment pointers, and incorporating them into our backend architecture.
As part of this effort, we have restructured our internal point-of-sale infrastructure to accommodate and utilize Open Payments pointers. Additionally, we completely rewrote the logic behind the acknowledgment process for adding or modifying a point-of-sale receiving account, streamlining and significantly improving the process end-to-end. This positions us to seamlessly execute transactions through any Open Payments-compatible provider we integrate going forward, broadening the range of payment options available to our users.
On the business development front, we have completed our company incorporation in the UAE, strengthening our presence in the region. We are also finalizing a draft agreement with the UAE licensed partner, which is expected to be signed shortly. Additionally, we have secured a memorandum of understanding with the Colombian authorized partner, along with sandbox access and a draft agreement, paving the way for our expansion into the Latin American market.
Project Impact & Target Audiences
FLIQA’s project integrates the Interledger Protocol (ILP) into our established Open Banking platform to deliver inclusive, low-cost digital financial services to populations that remain excluded from traditional banking infrastructure. Our primary target communities are migrant workers and unbanked populations in the UAE/GCC region and underserved individuals and SMEs across Latin America, with a particular focus on Colombia. These communities face significant barriers to financial participation: high remittance costs, limited access to credit and insurance products, lack of physical banking infrastructure in rural areas, and the risks associated with cash-dependent economies.
The groups that ultimately benefit from our project include Women & Girls, who are disproportionately excluded from formal financial systems in both the GCC and Latin America; Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), particularly Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities in rural Colombia where financial exclusion rates are highest; People with disabilities, who face additional barriers to accessing physical bank branches and benefit directly from our digital-first, device-independent approach; and other marginalized groups including migrant workers in the Gulf region (88% of the UAE’s population), informal economy participants, and rural populations without any proximity to banking services.
Our project directly advances the Interledger Foundation’s mission to broaden the diversity of voices in the technology ecosystem by using ILP as a driver for digital financial inclusion. By embedding ILF’s Open Payments standard and Rafiki framework into a platform that already connects to over 3,000 banks, we create an immediate and practical adoption pathway for Interledger Network technology. This is not a theoretical proof-of-concept; it is a real-world deployment that will bring ILP’s benefits—currency-agnostic, low-cost, interoperable payments—to communities that need them most.
Our work contributes new technology to the ecosystem through the development of a Java Interledger Client library, which will be made available as an open-source contribution, strengthening ILF’s interoperability standards. We are also increasing awareness of ILP’s capabilities among fintech stakeholders, regulators, and financial institutions in Latin America—a region where the protocol has significant untapped potential. By demonstrating that ILP can bridge traditional banking systems and decentralized finance in emerging markets, we are building the evidence base that will encourage wider adoption globally. Our multilingual, user-friendly interface, designed for low-bandwidth environments and non-tech-savvy users, ensures that the benefits of this technology reach the people who need it, rather than remaining accessible only to those already well-served by the financial system.
Progress on Objectives, Key Activities
During the first four months of the grant period, we have made a strategic decision to prioritize and accelerate our Colombian objectives. Given the current geopolitical instability in the Middle East, we have assessed that conditions in the UAE are not conducive to the pace of partnership development and market entry that our timeline requires. Rather than proceeding with uncertainty, we have redirected our energy toward Colombia, where we have established a strong and highly productive relationship with our local partner. This strategic pivot allows us to maximize impact in a region where the need is acute: Colombia has over 122 million unbanked individuals across the broader Latin American context, 41% of the population lives on low income, and 60% of the unbanked reside in rural areas with no access to physical bank branches. In conflict-affected regions, cash transport remains dangerous, making digital payment solutions not only convenient but essential for safety and economic participation.
Our market research and on-the-ground engagement during this period have confirmed that Colombia is a challenging market to enter. Colombia’s Superintendencia Financiera maintains thorough licensing and compliance standards and capital requirements. The evolving Open Banking regulatory framework adds further complexity for new entrants seeking to offer interoperable payment solutions. For a company entering from outside the region, navigating these barriers without a well-connected local partner would be prohibitively slow and resource-intensive.
This is precisely why our partnership with a local partner is so significant. They operate within the Colombian payments ecosystem and bring the local regulatory knowledge, established institutional relationships, and merchant network access that would otherwise take years to build independently. Through the local partner, we gain a credible and compliant pathway to connect with Colombian merchants, financial institutions, and end users — bypassing the barriers that typically prevent foreign fintech innovators from reaching the communities that need their solutions most. The strength of this partnership, which has deepened considerably over the first four months, gives us confidence that we can deliver a meaningful pilot in Colombia within our grant timeline despite the market’s inherent complexity.
In the first four months, we have achieved several milestones that directly support our impact goals. We have advanced the integration of payment pointers into FLIQA’s existing payments infrastructure, altering data structures and API endpoints to support ILP-based transactions. We have progressed commercial agreements with GateHub for Payment Pointer infrastructure and deepened our due diligence and onboarding processes with the local partner in Colombia, building on a Letter of Intent that was already in place.
Our team attended the Fintech Americas, strengthening our connections within the Latin American fintech ecosystem and validating the demand for interoperable payment solutions in the region. Concurrently, we executed market research on regulatory readiness for Open Banking and Open Payments across Latin America, identifying key stakeholders in the fintech and banking ecosystem who will be critical to our expansion.
Communications and Marketing
From the beginning, FLIQA has primarily grown through conversations. From networking events to direct engagement with partners, merchants, and industry stakeholders.
As our solution matures, we're becoming more intentional about sharing what we're working on through blog posts, articles, and community updates around open banking, digital payments, and financial innovation.
We have built up a solid base of use cases that show how FLIQA works in the real world. You can now follow our journey on LinkedIn and our website, where we post regular updates in both English and Slovenian.
What’s Next?
As outlined in our impact assessment, the first four months of the grant period have confirmed that our strongest near-term opportunity for meaningful deployment lies in Colombia rather than the UAE. The current geopolitical situation in the Middle East has introduced uncertainty into our UAE partnership timelines, while our relationship with the local partner in Colombia has proven exceptionally productive. For the remainder of the grant period, we will therefore accelerate our Colombian workstream while maintaining our UAE objectives at a pace appropriate to conditions on the ground. This does not represent a departure from our approved grant plan—all originally scoped deliverables remain on track—but rather a resequencing that prioritises the market where we can deliver the most impact in the shortest timeframe.
The immediate next phase of work centres on completing our core platform integration. We will incorporate our Colombian entity and begin development of payment hooks, analytics dashboards, and payment monitoring capabilities—critical infrastructure for both regulatory compliance and operational oversight in new markets. We will also complete the GateHub integration, which includes automating payment pointer acquisition and configuring sandbox and test wallet environments.
We also need to align the KYB (Know Your Business) process with our internal compliance workflows. This is essential for meeting regulatory requirements in both the Colombian and UAE markets. We will also update FLIQA’s public-facing website and tenant portal with dedicated ILF information, ensuring visibility for the Interledger Foundation and the role of Open Payments in our service offering.
The final period is where our work transitions from development to real-world deployment. We will focus on completing the integration of local partners’ APIs to gain access to local payment rails in Colombia. We will roll out a pilot project in either Colombia and/ or the UAE, testing our integrated ILP services with first clients and validating the end-to-end payment flow through our partnerships. This is a pivotal milestone: it connects the Interledger Protocol to Colombia’s domestic financial infrastructure, enabling low-cost transactions for the underserved populations we are targeting.
By the end of the grant period, FLIQA will have a fully integrated ILP-enabled Open Banking platform operating across two high-impact markets, with live pilot deployments demonstrating the protocol’s value for financial inclusion. Our open-source Java Interledger Client library will be available to the broader community, and our experience in navigating regulatory and partnership challenges in the GCC and Latin America will serve as a replicable model for future ILP deployments. We are well-positioned to transition from pilot to scale in the months following the grant, with established local partnerships and a proven technical foundation.
Community Support
As we move into the piloting phase of our project, we are actively seeking support in validating the merchant-side user experience in Colombia. Specifically, we are looking for a connection to a merchant based in Colombia - or to an individual or organization that could introduce us to one - who would be willing to participate in the testing phase of our product.
What we need is a merchant partner who can help us practically verify the end-to-end process: the integration workflow, the payment flow, and the overall user experience from the merchant’s perspective. This collaboration would be focused exclusively on testing and validating our ILP-enabled payment solution in a real-world merchant environment, ensuring that the experience is seamless, intuitive, and fit for purpose before we move to a broader rollout.
If anyone within the Interledger community has contacts in the Colombian commerce or fintech ecosystem - whether a merchant, a payment facilitator, or a business network - we would be very grateful for an introduction. Even an initial conversation with a potential partner would be valuable in helping us ensure that our solution meets the real needs of merchants operating in the Colombian market.
Additional Comments
Fintech Americas Miami 2026: Key Takeaways for FLIQA & Interledger Foundation
Market
LATAM fintech is maturing fast — open banking regulation accelerating in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia; reconfirming that it is the right timing for market entry
The ecosystem is growing, serious, well-funded, and there is a lot of interest in partnerships with established EU-based players
Prometeo (open banking infrastructure)
Single API = access to the majority of LATAM banks for both AIS and PIS — eliminates the need for individual bank integrations
Handles local regulatory compliance per country —important for entering LATAM
Direct strategic fit: FLIQA gets access to LATAM banks, incorporates them into its own solution, and also broadens Interledger reach
Very interested in the next steps of collaboration with FLIQA and joining the Interledger ecosystem
Top comments (0)