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People's Clearinghouse — ILF Grant Final Report

Roberto Valdovinos — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:21:03 +0000

Brief Project Description

People's Clearinghouse (PCH) is a digital payments platform designed to interconnect community banks and savings cooperatives in Mexico, among themselves, with the national financial system, and with international networks for account-deposited remittances. Built on the basis of open-source technology (Rafiki, Mojaloop, ILP), PCH is led by the Mexican Association of Social Sector Credit Unions (AMUCSS), an organization with four decades of experience building community-owned financial institutions in rural and indigenous regions. By routing remittances directly into community bank accounts rather than into cash, PCH aims to create a virtuous cycle: more local capital, more credit for productive projects, less inequality, and less forced migration.
For context on our earlier milestones, read our Progress Report #1.

Project Update

The arc: January 2024 to March 2026

When we signed with the Interledger Foundation in January 2024, we had a clear idea, a strong team of social finance leaders, a fresh cohort of eight young developers recruited mainly from the Technological University of the Mixteca in Oaxaca, and a simple prototype of the Cross-Network Provider (CNP), the connector that translates Rafiki cross-border transfers into the PCH switch format that community banks would connect to. What we didn't have was a production system. Or a mobile app. Or real integrations with core banking software. Or a connection to SPEI, Mexico's national real-time payment network. Or a production-grade infrastructure. Those are the things we built over the following two years.
It was a longer path than we anticipated because we had to adapt all our platform to a very specific regulation set by the Central Bank. And also because as we went deeper into the communities, we realized the scope of what "real financial inclusion" actually demands. A clearinghouse that connects financial institutions is not enough. You also need the institutions' clients to have a way to interact with their accounts digitally. And for that you need a mobile application. And for that application to be useful (rather than immediately abandoned for cash) you need AML compliance, settlement reports, fees management, QR payments, push notifications, a PISP security architecture. Each of these components was built, tested, demoed, and refined.
The grant was extended to support the final sprint toward a fully operational platform: SPEI integration, core banking system integrations, production deployment, and the live demo at the 2025 Interledger Summit in Mexico City.

The capstone: the live demo at ILF Summit 2025

The Interledger Summit in November 2025, held in the heart of Mexico City, was the moment everything came together. We presented on the main stage in front of an international audience, and then, live, we ran intra-clearinghouse and CNP-to-clearinghouse transactions.
We showed a Rafiki remittance launched from the ILF test wallet. Within milliseconds, the phone lit up: 223 Mexican pesos received, with a push notification showing the sender, the amount, the transaction ID, and a QR shareable receipt. Then we switched to the PCH mobile app and did a P2P transfer between two accounts on the switch (scanning QR code and with an instant audio notification). Then a merchant scenario: request-to-pay, pre-filled amount, biometric confirmation, instant settlement. Right after the demo, the audience of 200+ people downloaded the PCH demo app and were paying community producers from Oaxaca, Pahuatlán, and elsewhere who had come to the Summit to sell their crafts, using virtual balances topped up with Rafiki remittances from the ILF and PCH teams.
Behind each of those transactions ran a real-time AML engine inspecting every transfer in under a second, a gRPC-based switch routing funds through a modular bounded-context architecture, a PISP layer securing the mobile connection with public-key cryptography, and a compliance dashboard generating regulatory PDF reports with one click (the same reports that may have taken a money transmitter hours to produce manually).
The presentation also included a reference to a future development: a working offline payments prototype. Along many visits to rural communities we had realized that the internet is very unstable and that a successful digital payments network that impacts these regions requires new forms of connectivity.
The presentation closed with the entire PCH development team standing on the main stage in front of their work. Most of them had never imagined being there when they started their training on Rafiki and Mojaloop two years earlier in Oaxaca.

A reflection: from clearinghouse to full digital ecosystem

One thing changed significantly over the grant period, and it's worth being honest about it: our conception of what PCH needs to be.
We started with a clearinghouse: a technical infrastructure for routing transfers between financial institutions. That remains the core. But through community visits to places like Ejutla, San Pablito and Pahuatlán, we understood that connecting institutions is not the same as including people. If a community bank receives a real-time remittance but its clients still have to take a six-hour round trip to check their balance, nothing fundamental has changed in their lives. So we first built a Whatsapp payment bot solution, and then, after a series of discussions with the Central Bank, a mobile application so that the main payment channel would be entirely under our control. In building it, we had to build the PISP model (with its consent token architecture), all so that someone in a rural market could check their balance or pay for tortillas without touching a bank teller or having to take a bus.
This deeper scope is why the timeline extended, and we think it was worth every extra month.

Technical deliverables: completed

By March 2026, all four deliverables defined in the grant extension have been achieved:

Rafiki/CNP cross-border scheme: complete. The CNP is fully production-ready: it handles ILP routing from a US-based Rafiki wallet to a Mexican community bank account, performs real-time AML inspection, manages FX rate integration, produces compliance reports, and exposes an operator admin portal for liquidity management and reconciliation. The CNP architecture has been refined since the first successful demo in August 2024, now including idempotency, error handling, and a complete transfer lifecycle model that keeps Rafiki and PCH in sync.
Production deployment: complete. PCH's infrastructure runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on GCP, with managed services for databases (Cloud SQL, Firestore), messaging (managed Kafka), security (GCP KMS for certificate management), and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch/Kibana). CI/CD pipelines automate testing and deployment. Backups are retained according to Central Bank requirements. The environment was stress-tested with 200+ simultaneous users during the ILF Summit demo before being hardened into the current production configuration. A walkthrough of the production environment is available.
SPEI integration: complete. PCH can now send transfers to any account in Mexico's national financial system. The integration uses a Hermes, deployed in PCH's own environment, which is a SPEI gateway provided by Conecta, one of the main SPEI specialists in the country. When a user sends money to a phone number that doesn't belong to a PCH participant, the switch automatically looks up the recipient's CLABE through a Central Bank service and routes the transfer through SPEI. From the user's perspective, the experience is identical to an internal transfer. A demo of this integration is available.
Core banking system integrations: complete. Two CBS integrations are now production-ready. Mifos, an open-source core banking system with broad adoption among social financial institutions, was the first to be fully integrated, with a reusable gRPC client library published in a public GitHub repository. This effort was possible through the invaluable work of Fintecheando, a main tech actor in the Mexican fintech ecosystem. The integration was showcased at the Interledger Summit 2025. Sinefi, a core banking system used by approximately 25 financial entities serving around one million clients in Mexico, was integrated second, with its CEO participating in the final integration demo. Both systems authenticate to the PCH switch using certificate-based mutual TLS, follow the same gRPC synchronous connection protocol, and can perform lookups and fund transfers in real time. The expertise acquired in the process means that onboarding additional CBS providers now requires far less custom development. Demos of the Mifos integration and the Sinefi integration are available.

Authorization process: at the threshold

The Central Bank authorization process has been one of the longer threads of this journey, and one that has required us to stay close and responsive to regulatory feedback at every stage. The good news is that every required element is now in place: the switch software meets all regulatory requirements, the operational documentation and compliance manuals have been updated to reflect the final architecture, and the formal submission package is complete. We are, genuinely, at the threshold of a new phase. Our expectation is that PCH will receive its clearinghouse authorization and be ready for launch by the summer of 2026.
When that happens, our intention is to reach several hundred thousand customers through our partner financial institutions (AMUCSS' network of 140 community banks, four of Mexico's five largest savings cooperatives, and Sinefi's network of 25 financial entities) before the end of the year. For most of those customers, it will be the first time they have had access to digital payments, real-time transfers, and account-deposited remittances. That is the moment the entire project has been building toward.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

PCH exists because certain communities have always been left out of the equation, not by accident, but by design. National banking systems optimize for scale and profitability. Rural communities, indigenous regions, and the migrants who send money back to them don't fit that model. PCH is built specifically for them.

The communities and their financial institutions

The most direct beneficiaries are the members of the social financial institutions that PCH connects: AMUCSS' network of 140 community banks, four of Mexico's five largest savings cooperatives, and Sinefi's network of 25 financial entities. Together, these institutions serve several million individual account holders in rural, semi-rural, and peri-urban regions across Mexico, predominantly in areas where commercial banks are absent or inaccessible. In the near term, these are the people PCH will serve at launch.
Looking further, the social financial sector as a whole (savings cooperatives, community banks, and social-purpose financial institutions) counts some 17 million users across Mexico. PCH is built to serve all of them over time, as a sector-wide shared infrastructure rather than a product for any single institution.
Two thirds of AMUCSS' users are women. Many are speakers of indigenous languages (Zapotec, Mixtec, Nahuatl, and others) in communities where cultural and linguistic barriers compound the financial ones. Many are the wives, mothers, and daughters of migrants working in the United States, managing household economies that depend on remittances arriving in cash, at significant cost and risk. For them, the difference between a cash remittance and an account-deposited one is not a technical detail. It is the difference between money that arrives safely, is captured by a local institution that can lend it back productively, and multiplies, versus money that arrives in an envelope, gets spent immediately, and leaves no trace in the formal financial system.
PCH's design reflects these realities. The platform already supports multilingual interfaces and at launch will include indigenous-languages. The mobile application is designed for low-connectivity environments (because a payment platform that only works on a strong LTE signal is not a platform for Oaxaca's mountains or Puebla's high valleys). The switch connection protocol was engineered for resilience on unstable internet lines, with automatic reconnection, because many community bank branches operate on basic subscriber lines that go down. And the offline payments prototype will be developed too, aimed squarely at communities where the internet does not reach at all.

The migrants

On the other side of the transfer flow are the millions of Mexican migrants living and working in the United States, the largest remittance corridor in the world, with over $60 billion USD sent annually. Today, most of those transfers arrive as cash, delivered through agents, at fees that eat into money that families need. PCH's CNP offers a path toward account-to-account remittances via Rafiki, directly into the recipient's community bank or savings cooperative. The Mexican migrant in the US can use a Rafiki-compatible wallet. Their family in Oaxaca or Hidalgo receives the funds in their account, in seconds. No cash agent. No distance-based fee. No trip to town.
This is not a marginal improvement. It is a structural change in how remittances work and in what they can do for the communities that depend on them.

The developers

One impact of this project that is easy to overlook, but worth naming, is what happened to the team that built it. Eight young developers were recruited from local Oaxaca universities in indigenous regions through a rigorous selection process that prioritized strong coding skills, English proficiency, and genuine commitment to social justice. Most of them had no prior exposure to ILP, Mojaloop, or Rafiki. Over two years, they became the heart of the project. They even contributed pull requests to the Rafiki repository. They debugged the vNext Mojaloop switch alongside its original architects. They presented their work at international summits in Cape Town, Cluj and Mexico City. They stood on the main stage at the 2025 Interledger Summit in front of an audience from around the world.
We believe this matters: not just as a feel-good story, but as a model. An innovative fintech ecosystem does not need to be built only in San Francisco or London or Singapore. It can be built in Oaxaca, by people who have a direct stake in the communities the technology is meant to serve.

Alignment with the Interledger Foundation's mission

PCH is the ILF mission made concrete. It is built on the basis of open standards and open-source software to move value across networks that previously could not communicate. It prioritizes the populations most excluded from existing financial systems. And it demonstrates that ILP-based technology is not only viable for global finance: it is specifically well-suited for the places global finance has forgotten. The communities that will benefit from PCH are exactly those the ILF exists to reach: women, indigenous communities, rural populations, migrants, and the institutions that have chosen to serve them for decades, without waiting for the market to catch up.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

The CNP: Rafiki-to-PCH bridge

The Cross-Network Provider was PCH's original technical bet: the idea that a single entity could sit between the Interledger network and a Mojaloop-based clearinghouse, translating the language of one into the language of the other. By the summer of 2024, the CNP was working: a Rafiki transfer initiated from a US-based wallet could reach a community bank account in Mexico, end to end, passing through the CNP and the PCH switch. We demonstrated this live at the Oaxaca Workweek in August 2024 and again at the Interledger Summit in Cape Town in October 2024 (the first public proof that this kind of cross-network bridge was not only theoretically sound but practically buildable).
Since then, the CNP has grown considerably. The core architecture remains: Rafiki on the Mexican side receives the ILP transfer, the CNP backend processes it, the PCH switch routes it to the right participant, and the community bank credits the recipient's account. The CNP also handles real-time FX rate queries, idempotency logic to prevent duplicate transfers, a complete error-handling model that keeps Rafiki and the switch in sync even when things go wrong on one side, an operator admin portal with liquidity dashboards and reconciliation tools, and automated compliance reports that previously required hours of manual work. What was a working prototype in 2024 is now a production-ready system.

The switch: building on Mojaloop

The PCH switch — the clearinghouse hub that routes transfers between participants, manages the position ledger, and handles settlement — is built on Mojaloop vNext, the next-generation version of the Mojaloop open-source payment switch. The decision to use Mojaloop was one of the best we made: it gave us a mature codebase, detailed technical documentation, an active global community, and direct access to the people who built it. The support we received from so many people and organizations familiar with Mojaloop vNext has been foundational.
We took the Mojaloop vNext switch and adapted it significantly for PCH's specific regulatory and operational context. Settlement logic, fees management, and compliance reporting were either absent or insufficient in the open-source version: not because Mojaloop neglected them, but because they depend on the specifics of each jurisdiction's financial regulation. We built them for Mexico, for the Central Bank requirements, and for the practical realities of small financial institutions. We also introduced a synchronous gRPC connection model that allows community banks to connect to the switch without implementing a full asynchronous message queue (a practical necessity given the technical resources available at these institutions). We also took advantage of the switch's architecture around bounded contexts, making the codebase modular enough to evolve quickly without breaking existing functionality.

Core banking system integrations

Connecting the PCH switch to a core banking system (CBS), the software that a community bank or savings cooperative uses to manage accounts, transactions, and clients, is the step that makes the platform real for participants. Without it, the switch has nowhere to route funds.
PCH uses gRPC as its integration protocol: a high-performance, contract-based remote procedure call framework developed by Google that uses Protocol Buffers for serialization. It is fast, secure, and built for bidirectional streaming. As such, it seems a good solution for a payment switch that needs persistent connections with participants. The challenge is that gRPC is essentially unknown in the Mexican financial sector. Every integration has had to begin from scratch: explaining the protocol, walking technical teams through the connection model, explaining client libraries, debugging certificate-based authentication flows, and running joint tests before the first successful lookup could be made.
That investment is now paying off. Mifos (an open-source CBS with broad adoption among social financial institutions globally) was the first to be fully integrated, with a reusable TypeScript gRPC client library published in a public repository. Fintecheando, a key partner in the Mexican fintech ecosystem with deep Mifos expertise, was essential to making this integration happen. Sinefi, a proprietary CBS used by approximately 25 Mexican financial entities serving roughly one million clients, was integrated second, with Sinefi's CEO participating directly in the final demo and validating the result.

SPEI integration: connecting to Mexico's national payment network

SPEI, Mexico's real-time gross settlement system, operated by the Central Bank, is the backbone of the country's financial system. Any payment that needs to reach a bank account outside the PCH network has to go through SPEI. Getting there required not only a technical integration but a careful architectural design, because SPEI is an RTGS system (settling each transaction individually and in real time) while PCH operates as a net settlement platform, a fundamental difference with regulatory and operational consequences that took months of analysis and design sessions to resolve properly.
The integration was made possible through close collaboration with Conecta, one of Mexico's leading SPEI specialists and the provider of Hermes, the SPEI integration platform deployed in PCH's own environment. Conecta's team held weekly sessions with PCH's developers throughout the integration process, clarifying SPEI's operational logic, validating the transfer flows, and helping navigate the certification requirements. Their knowledge saved PCH an enormous amount of time that would otherwise have been spent reverse-engineering a regulatory system from documentation alone.
The result: when a PCH participant's client sends money to a phone number that doesn't belong to a PCH participant, the switch queries the Central Bank’s CLABE registry to retrieve the recipient's bank account identifier, formats the request according to SPEI's specifications, routes it through Hermes, and receives a webhook confirmation from the Central Bank when settlement is complete. From the sender's perspective, it looks exactly like any other transfer. Behind the scenes, it reaches any bank account in Mexico.

Production environment: built for the Central Bank

The infrastructure that runs PCH is not the same infrastructure that ran the 2024 demo. After the November 2025 ILF Summit, which stress-tested the system with over 200 simultaneous users in a live public setting, the team spent three months rebuilding the environment from the ground up according to Central Bank requirements and Kubernetes production best practices.
The current production environment runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on GCP, with managed services for all critical components: Cloud SQL and Firestore for databases, managed Kafka for messaging, GCP Key Management Service for certificate creation and storage, and a dedicated observability cluster running Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, and Kibana. CI/CD pipelines automate building, testing, and security scanning end to end (a code change triggers a build, a security scan, a deployment, and a Slack notification); deployment to the production environment includes a manual approval gate as required by security policy. Backups are generated daily and retained on a schedule that meets the Central Bank's specific archiving requirements. Pod security policies enforce least-privilege principles throughout the cluster.
Every architectural decision has been made with the authorization audit in mind. The documentation that accompanies the technical build is as complete as the system itself.

Mobile app and PISP: banking for institutions without apps

The majority of community banks and savings cooperatives in Mexico do not have a mobile banking application. Building one is expensive for a small financial entity, requires technical teams they don't have, and requires regulatory approvals they'd need years to obtain. PCH's mobile app solves this problem simply: it connects not to the bank but to the PCH switch, which connects to the bank. Any institution that joins the PCH network gets a branded mobile banking experience for its clients on day one, without writing a line of code.
The security architecture behind this is called the PISP model (Payment Initiation Service Provider). When a client onboards to the app, a cryptographic key pair is generated on their device. A consent token issued by the community bank, signed and stored by the switch, governs exactly what the app can do on the client's behalf: which accounts are accessible, whether transfers can be initiated, and under what conditions. The bank retains full control. The client has full transparency. The switch is the trusted intermediary.
The current app supports balance checks, P2P transfers by phone number, QR-code payments, request-to-pay flows, and real-time push notifications with audio alerts, useful in market settings where someone is handling goods rather than watching a screen. It is not yet as polished as the mobile apps of Mexico's major commercial banks. But it works, it is secure, and it gives institutions and their clients a foundation to build on. We will continue developing it until it is.

AML: real-time compliance as a shared service

Anti-money laundering compliance is one of the heaviest operational burdens for small financial institutions. Mexico's financial regulator (CNBV) requires AML validation in real time for every transaction. Most community banks and savings cooperatives lack the technical infrastructure to do this, and even if they had it, building and maintaining a real-time AML engine is a significant and ongoing investment.
PCH's AML engine solves this as a shared service. When a transfer enters the network, particularly a cross-border remittance arriving via the CNP, the AML module intercepts it before it reaches the recipient's institution. It queries the client's profile in an AML database, checks against official blocked-persons lists, evaluates the transfer against the client's historical transaction pattern, and assigns a risk score. The whole process runs in under a second. If the transfer passes, it proceeds. If it's flagged, it's held for review.
The key innovation here is that the CNP can perform all these validations itself, using the party data it has already gathered during the lookup phase of the transfer. The community bank does not have to do anything. This is especially significant for remittances, which are the highest-risk transfer type from a regulatory perspective and the ones that community banks were least equipped to handle compliantly on their own.

Settlement, fees, and reporting

Settlement, fees, and compliance reporting tend to be underestimated in fintech projects and overdue in production. They are also the ones that regulators care about most.
In the Mojaloop vNext open-source base, settlement logic exists but is not calibrated for Mexico's regulatory framework, fee management is non-existent, and reporting is not designed for the specific formats and periodicities required by the Central Bank. PCH built all three from scratch, aligned with the specific requirements of the authorization process. Settlement reports are generated automatically. Fee calculations are configurable per participant and per transaction type. Compliance reports can be produced with a single click, in the formats required by Mexican financial regulators. These are not glamorous features, but without them the platform cannot legally operate. They are done.

Documentation and regulatory submission

The process of building a clearinghouse in Mexico requires submitting to the Central Bank a complete package of technical documentation, operational manuals, compliance procedures, risk frameworks, and internal norms, all of which must reflect the final, production-ready state of the system. For most of the grant period, the documentation process ran in parallel with the development process, which meant that every time the architecture evolved, the documents had to evolve too.
That cycle is now complete. The switch software meets all regulatory requirements. Every component of the operational documentation has been updated to reflect the current architecture. The formal submission package is ready. We expect to submit it imminently and to receive authorization in the summer of 2026.

Key social and collaborative activities

The technical work was never the whole story. Over the course of the grant, PCH was part of an extraordinary set of collaborative moments, some that shaped the technical direction of the project, others that expanded its human and institutional reach. Here are the main ones.

Oaxaca Work Week, August 2024

In the second week of August 2024, a team of five from the Interledger Foundation joined 20 PCH developers and collaborators for a full work week at a coworking space in Oaxaca City. It was the first time the two teams had worked in the same room. The week began with PCH's first major live demo: a complete end-to-end remittance from a US test wallet, through the CNP and the PCH switch, arriving at an account in a Mexican community bank. The ILF team was impressed.
The rest of the week was spent in deep technical sessions on the CNP's outstanding requirements, the settlement model, the SPEI integration architecture (with Conecta and Sinefi representatives present), and production deployment planning. On the third day, the entire group celebrated with a traditional Oaxacan calenda (a brass-band street parade with giant papier-mâché puppets) that wound through the streets of Oaxaca City, picking up curious locals along the way. On the fourth day, the group visited three community banks in the Oaxaca region: the offices of Red Oaxaca (a network of microbanks serving families across the greater Oaxaca area), a visit to Acreimex (a savings cooperative with 62 branches and 425,000 account holders), and a trip to Ejutla, a rural town an hour and a half away, where the team saw what day-to-day banking looks like for people in a small community (including what happens when the internet goes down). They also visited a mezcalero (an artisanal mezcal producer), whose business expansion was being financed by a Red Oaxaca microloan. The week closed with a clear shared roadmap toward the Cape Town Summit.

Rafiki Work Week, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, August 2024

Four PCH developers attended the Rafiki Work Week organized by the ILF at BreakPoint IT's offices in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a gathering that brought together 20+ engineers from Rafiki, GateHub, JoPACC, and PCH. The PCH team worked directly with ILF's engineering and technical writing teams on outstanding Rafiki integration requirements, including how to handle KYC data flows, how to manage transfer status updates, and how to improve the deployment documentation for Rafiki integrators. Several of PCH's real-world deployment challenges directly informed improvements to Rafiki's official documentation. PCH developers also had pull requests merged into the Rafiki repository during the week.

Interledger Summit 2024, Cape Town, South Africa

At the annual Interledger Summit in Cape Town in October 2024, PCH presented on the main stage for the first time to a global audience. The presentation covered the social and economic rationale for the project: the Dutch disease paradox of remittances, the untapped potential of community banks, and the role of ILP in connecting them, and closed with a live demo. A transfer was initiated from the ILF test wallet using a phone-number-based wallet address, routed through the CNP and the PCH switch, and confirmed as received at a community bank account. The CNP dashboard showed the transaction in real time. A compliance report was generated with one click. A WhatsApp notification arrived at the recipient's phone. The audience, including Interledger community members from around the world, saw for the first time that this model was not theoretical: it was running code.

Payments Canada Summit panel, Toronto, February 2025

PCH participated in an Interledger Foundation panel at the Payments Canada Summit in Toronto, bringing the project's perspective to one of the most important payments industry forums in Canada. The panel addressed cross-border payments innovation, the US-Mexico remittance corridor, and the potential of innovative fintech to serve populations that commercial payment systems have not reached. It was an opportunity to speak directly to the North American financial sector about what PCH is building and why.

Rafiki Work Week, Cluj, Romania, July 2025

PCH was again represented at the Rafiki Work Week in July 2025, now held in the broader Transylvania region and gathering 38 participants from 8+ organizations. The week focused on Rafiki's next architectural evolution: a full event-driven redesign for horizontal scalability, new Open Payments documentation in multiple languages (including Spanish), a Kubernetes Operator for simplified deployment, card and POS integrations, and a Payment Pointer to SEPA flow. PCH's team participated across workstreams, contributing to the ongoing alignment between Rafiki's roadmap and PCH's production requirements.

Oaxaca Work Week, 2025

A second Oaxaca Work Week was organized in 2025 at La Clínica, a space in the heart of Oaxaca City that became PCH's workshop home for the week. The gathering brought together PCH's full development team alongside ILF engineers and partners for an intensive five-day sprint. The week featured demos of the consumer mobile app, the admin portal, the DevOps pipelines, the Kubernetes operator, and the CBS integrations; technical workstreams on PISP/3PPI, the Rafiki integration, settlement, performance, and scalability; and in-depth planning for the production environment and the November Summit demo. It was the most complete convening of the PCH and ILF teams to date and the last major collaborative technical sprint before the platform went into final production hardening.

Mexico Student Hackathons, September 2025

In September 2025, the Interledger Foundation organized four university hackathons across Mexico (in Oaxaca, the State of Mexico, Aguascalientes, and Mexico City) with PCH's active participation, both in organizing and tutoring during the hackathons. Over 500 students from 40+ higher education institutions explored solutions using the Open Payments API, from remittance tools to agricultural payment platforms to accessible transport systems. The Oaxaca hackathon was held at UABJO (the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca). Students from the Technological University of the Mixteca (PCH devs’ main alma mater) participated alongside students from eight other institutions.

Mumbai Fintech Fest, October 2025

People’s Clearinghouse participated in the largest fintech festival in the world alongside representatives of CECOBAN (an important clearinghouse in Mexico) and Interledger Foundation, to present its platform in a cross-border panel in front of an audience of 200 people. The visit included a private full day of analysis and discussions at the headquarters of the National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI) in order to understand how India’s national RTGS and the country's financial inclusion strategy work. It also included invaluable discussions at the HQ of the amazing Savatra Technologies team, responsible for 80% of UPI integrations in India, and a key model for what PCH aspires to become.

Pahuatlán Workshop, October 2025

In preparation for the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the ILF's Summit Program Committee organized an immersion workshop in Pahuatlán, a mountainous community in Puebla known for its centuries-old Amate paper craft. The workshop brought together technologists, grant makers, community builders, and open-source advocates alongside AMUCSS community bankers and local artisans. The group learned about the financial realities of rural communities: the cooperative savings systems, the harvest-season loans, the three-hour round trips to check a bank balance, the predatory lenders who fill the gaps at rates exceeding 500%. We discussed how open payment infrastructure can be designed around these realities rather than in spite of them. The experience directly shaped both the agenda of the Mexico City Summit and PCH's own thinking about what the mobile application needed to provide.

Interledger Summit 2025, Mexico City

The Interledger Foundation chose Mexico City for its 2025 Summit. PCH presented on the main stage to an audience that had already seen the documentary film about PCH before the session began (more on that below). The presentation covered the evolution of the platform from clearinghouse to full digital ecosystem, with a particular focus on why that evolution was necessary, not as a technical decision, but as a social one. Live demos showed the complete transfer flow: Rafiki remittance arriving with a push notification, P2P transfer by QR code, merchant payment with audio notification, and the PCH admin dashboard confirming every transaction in real time. Isabel Cruz, AMUCSS' Executive Director, closed the session by presenting the producers and speaking about 40 years of community finance work: the human story behind every line of code.

Communications and Marketing

International press coverage

PCH's story has reached audiences well beyond the Interledger community. A coordinated press effort, developed in partnership with the ILF communications team, resulted in coverage in some of the most respected outlets in global finance and fintech.
The Banker covered the US-Mexico corridor angle in depth. PaymentsJournal explored the cross-border payments dimension. Finextra focused on the community banking angle. The Paypers covered the ILF partnership announcement. Fintech Finance News and Citybiz reported on the project's launch. The Global Treasurer covered the remittances angle, and Financial IT also published pieces on the project.
PCH has deliberately kept a relatively low public profile in Mexico itself while the Central Bank authorization process is ongoing: a deliberate choice to ensure the regulatory conversation remains fluid and direct, without external noise. Once authorized, that changes.

"The People's Code", a documentary film

In September 2025, a documentary film about PCH premiered at Cine Tonalá in Mexico City: The People's Code, produced independently by a Mexican production company with Interledger support.
The film matters for reasons that go beyond press coverage. A project like PCH lives at the intersection of social history, economic theory, indigenous communities, open-source software, and financial regulation: a combination that is almost impossible to communicate in a press release or a conference slide. The documentary does something different: it shows what this work actually looks like from the inside. It shows Isabel Cruz and AMUCSS' community bankers in the field, their relationships with communities that have been organizing their own finances for decades without external validation. It shows the developers in Oaxaca: young people from indigenous regions building fintech infrastructure that most of the global financial world has never heard of. It shows the farmers and artisans who are the reason any of this matters. And it shows the friction, the uncertainty, and the slow accumulation of trust that a project of this kind actually requires.
We believe that a social-technological project that cannot explain itself in human terms is a project with a communication problem and possibly a mission problem. The People's Code is our evidence that PCH has neither. It is a record of the "behind the cameras" of building technology for a purpose, and of the communities that gave us the reason to build it.

"The Missing Link": academic paper on remittances and development

In September 2025, PCH co-authored a major academic and policy paper alongside Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda (UCLA), Isabel Cruz Hernández (AMUCSS), and Yvonne Su (Oxford): The Missing Link: Remittances & Socially Trusted Financial Intermediation as Key Elements for Addressing Root Causes of Migration.
The paper makes a rigorous empirical case for something PCH has always argued intuitively: that cash remittances, in the absence of proper financial intermediation, do not foster regional development: they often undermine it. Drawing on data from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the authors document what they call the "vicious cycle of remittances": cash inflows into communities without productive infrastructure cause localized inflation, reduce competitiveness, and paradoxically deepen economic dependence on migration. Remittances growing at 165% in Mexico over the past decade (now exceeding $60 billion annually, far outpacing foreign direct investment) while rural communities remain structurally underdeveloped is not a paradox. It is a predictable consequence of the wrong delivery model.
The paper then describes the "virtuous cycle": what happens when remittances arrive into community-owned financial institutions that can convert them into savings, credit, and local investment. Employment grows. Productive projects are funded. Economic dependence on migration decreases. The authors document that this model already exists, partially, in the network of savings cooperatives and community banks that AMUCSS and its peers have been building for four decades. What has been missing is the fintech infrastructure to make it work at scale, which is exactly what PCH is building.
The paper closes with six concrete policy recommendations across regulatory, technological, and social dimensions, and includes a textbox specifically describing PCH and the Interledger Protocol as a working implementation of the virtuous cycle framework.
The paper was distributed as a designed, printed booklet at fintech events in Mexico and India, reaching several hundreds of practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. It was also published digitally and shared through ILF channels. It is, we believe, the most complete intellectual articulation of why PCH exists, and one that places it within a broader conversation about migration policy, development finance, and the responsibilities of technological innovation.

Broader outreach: Toronto, India, and beyond

Communications and marketing, for a project like PCH, are never just about getting our name in the press. They are also about listening to other regions, other systems, other approaches to problems that look like ours from a distance and turn out, up close, to be both different and illuminating.
The panel at the Payments Canada Summit in Toronto was a case in point: speaking to practitioners from one of the world's most regulated and sophisticated payment ecosystems about why fintech infrastructure for isolated areas matters for countries generated conversations we wouldn't have had otherwise about regulatory philosophy, about what "inclusion" means to people who design systems from the top down rather than from the community up, and about the potential of the US-Mexico corridor for the North American financial sector. Also, remittances are not a Mexican problem: the vicious cycle of cash remittances is a global pattern. And the policy recommendations that emerge from studying Mexico apply, with adaptation, to corridors across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central America. Sharing PCH's work in those contexts has helped us understand which parts of our model are genuinely transferable and which are specific to Mexico's regulatory and social landscape.

What’s Next?

Authorization and launch

The most important milestone ahead is the one we've been working toward since January 2024: Central Bank authorization. The documentation package is complete, the software meets all regulatory requirements, and we expect to submit the final version to the Central Bank imminently. Our expectation is that PCH will be authorized and ready for commercial launch by the summer of 2026.

Cross-border operations: finding the right partners

With the CNP production-ready and the Rafiki scheme complete, the cross-border layer of PCH is technically operational. What comes next is building the commercial and institutional relationships that will make it real. Starting this summer, we will be actively seeking new partners on the US side: financial institutions, money transmitters, and Rafiki-compatible wallets that want to participate in a genuinely different remittance model. We have been in contact with MiPlata, a fellow ILF grantee with a growing presence in the US-Mexico corridor, and see great potential in this collaboration, not as a commercial arrangement alone, but as a shared contribution to the communities both projects are committed to serving.

Commercial rollout: a fieldwork process

Launching a digital payments platform is not the same as delivering it. The community banks and savings cooperatives that will join the PCH network are institutions with deep roots in the communities they serve, and many of those communities have had little or no exposure to digital financial tools. We cannot release an application, send a press announcement, and assume adoption will follow.
What we are beginning instead is a much more deliberate process: conversations with the representatives of partner institutions, but also with community leaders, with the people who use those banks and cooperatives every day, and with the local organizations that have been building trust in those communities for decades. We are designing training strategies and community support models that account for the reality that someone receiving their first digital remittance may never have interacted with a financial app before. We are planning field visits, pilot programs, and feedback loops that will shape how the platform is introduced and how it evolves after introduction.

Offline payments

A meaningful portion of the communities PCH aims to serve have unreliable or no internet access. We believe that digital financial inclusion in those communities requires a payments model that does not depend on a continuous connection, one in which transactions can be initiated and confirmed locally, then cleared to the network when connectivity is restored. We are committed to developing this capability, because without it, the platform's reach has a ceiling that we are not willing to accept.

Community Support

We have been fortunate to build PCH surrounded by a community that has been generous with its time, expertise, and belief in what we are doing. We would like that community to continue growing, and there are specific areas where new collaborations could make a real difference.
The most immediate need is on the cross-border side. If you are working in remittances, as a money transmitter, a Rafiki implementor, a wallet provider, or a fintech operating in the US-Mexico corridor or similar corridors, we want to talk. PCH's CNP is ready to connect to the right partners. MiPlata has been a promising point of contact, and we are eager to expand that circle. Every new Rafiki-compatible entity that connects to our network extends the reach of the platform directly into the communities waiting for it.
Beyond remittances, we are always interested in connecting with organizations working on financial inclusion in rural and indigenous contexts, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. The problems PCH is solving are not unique to Mexico, and the solutions we are building are designed to be adaptable. If you see a parallel between your context and ours, we would genuinely like to hear from you.
Finally: if you know policymakers, regulators, or researchers working on migration, development finance, or remittances policy who should know about The Missing Link paper and the model it describes, please share it. The academic and policy case for what PCH is doing needs to reach people who can act on it, not just people who already agree with it.

Additional Comments

We want to close this report with gratitude. The Interledger Foundation has been far more than a funder to PCH. The ILF team — its grant program team, its engineers, its communications colleagues — has been present at every stage of this journey: in Oaxaca, in Cape Town, in Cluj, in Pahuatlán, in Mexico City, and in countless calls across time zones in between. The patience, the technical depth, and the genuine care for the mission that characterize the ILF staff have made an enormous difference to what PCH became. We thank them sincerely.
We also want to acknowledge the extraordinary network of people and organizations who contributed to this work in ways that don't appear in grant reports but are indispensable to how projects like this actually get built. The Mojaloop Foundation and its community, particularly those who gave generously of their time to support our work on the switch. ThitsaWorks, whose Mojaloop expertise was essential in the early phases. Fintecheando, whose knowledge of the Mexican fintech ecosystem and commitment to open-source collaboration was invaluable. Conecta, for their patience and expertise in walking us through SPEI. Sinefi's team, for embracing a new integration model in an environment where gRPC was entirely unfamiliar. The team at Breakpoint IT in Cluj, for twice hosting us with warmth and excellent coffee. And the many others (developers, advisors, community leaders, artisans, mezcaleros, and bank tellers) who shared their knowledge, their time, and their lives with us over these two years.
Most of all: to the development team in Oaxaca, who built this. You know who you are, and you know what you did. The communities this platform will serve are lucky to have had you building for them. We are not done. We are just getting to a new stage.

Five Years After Being a Grantee: How Things Are Going for Me

Radhy — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:02:19 +0000

So I got email about upcoming newsletter so I reckon I'd write some updates regarding my journey as a grantee from 2021.

A word about my project

First things first, the grant funded project that I was working on, ProgNovel, was officially dead - though not simply. Shortly after Coil discontinued in 2023, I put my project on hiatus and put development on hold due to many reasons. I had few inquiries about the project but the adoption rate was abysmal so the hiatus decision wasn't so damaging.

At that time one of the main reason for my hiatus was a technical one. One Javascript framework, Astro, was rising at the time and it has things that my project was all about. So I explore and dabble some projects with it and see if I can learn one thing or two. It was so good and as the exploration went on, some things came to my mind thinking about my hiatus project: "well, it's cooked now" or "what's the point continuing if this framework has it all". Fast forward to 2026 I thought it again and realized that it was really cooked from the start. Seeing the technical prowess and inovation that Astro team has (that led them acquired by Cloudflare) left me no room to compete with them.

The project ProgNovel went hiatus in 2023, it was never returned, archived in 2024.

What comes after that

So during my exploration on Astro framework gave birth of a social media project that I named ProgForum - the prefix Prog because it was a spritual successor for my archived project ProgNovel. I didn't choose to build novel platform again and pick a social media because the previous experience wasn't going well for me, a decision that proved quite right since now that community was filled with industrialized AI generated slop content that even prominent creators had since "pulled out" of the scene by cashing out and sold their platform to some Korean IT giants. The dead internet theory was so true in that community that beginners starting out creating content won't ever have chance to compete with contents pumping out of ChatGPT or Gemini.

Anyway, back on ProgForum topic; this thing is built on Astro, the thing that made me gave up on my previous project. And one thing that so good about Astro is that it's an agnostic framework, meaning my years of learning of Svelte framework during building ProgNovel wasn't wasted - many codes even reused in the new project. While Astro had its own edge I had fun building a social media with it. Astro was a framework that was ahead of its time adopting next gen tech like View Transitions - the most fun I ever had working on a project. Seeing that one component seamlessly morphing into other component as the page transitions make me want to give a chef kiss every time.

As a social media, ProgForum has two tightly knitted spaces - tweet feed à la Twitter where users can, well, tweet, and another one is a good old fashioned forum where people can discuss things at great length.

There's a plan for Web Monetizaton in this: later on users can set payment pointer so they can stream revenue when people engaging with their tweets or forum post the made. It was pretty simple at that front. The real challange however come from another (that I thought pretty rad) freature that I'd like to call emoji clapping. It is a emoji "like" button like any other reactions button in other social media like Discord but instead of toggling a button you clap (like clapping mechanic in Medium website). So one user can give multiple emojies and claps on them multiple time because I thought sometimes one thumb up might not enough - sometimes you just want to slap multiple thumbs up, even thousands if you can (ignoring the fact that is's phyiscally imposible in real life), just so you can express how you enjoy tweets or contents people made. Now here's the Web Monetization comes into place: or rather, it has more to do with Interledger payment than Web Monetization API, as emoji claps can be used as "currency" to reward creators. There wasn't a solid final plan on how to do this but the general idea is that by the end of the month or so you can setup a tipping budget (either by subscription or one time payment) that split tips to creators based on how much you spend mouse clicks clapping emojies on them. Clap clap clap. Money money money.

ProgForum started around 2024. Around 2 years in, it wasn't actively developed and I haven't picked it up since last year. The thing about Astro is that it is a Javascript framework. And the thing about Javascript is that it moves fast and break things even faster. One morning (let's call it morning because I don't remember the exact time) I just happen to chill and see - oh cool, a new update! Run the command to update dependencies and immediately starting to regret it. Not only it breaks the dev server, even after rolling back, the dev start command won't even start anymore. The error message I see wasn't helping much because the thing about shiny new toy in coding is that because it's new, there wasn't enough people to share their error problems and not much posts on the internet for me to fix my problem. I didn't know whether Astro framework, or Svelte, or Tailwind CSS v4, Drizzle, or Bun that gives the problem (all of them was quite new and or was in unstable version at the time because I fancy myself creating "next-gen" social platform), after amateurly diagnosing the problem myself and failed at it only to rage OS restart, the problem somehow went away on its own later on. I don't know which one that has the new update that fix the problem, but anyway I could still continue developing the project. However, despite some feature ready to test like emojis, tweets, and comments, and so on, the previous errors left me jaded and I felt like I don't want to give a chef kiss anymore.

I didn't touch it again somewhere in 2025 because my focus went to another side project (a Javascript game) and some hackatons. The code is just sitting there, and since it was a project that I had the most fun and had the feature that I proud of (like emoji claps and the transition animation), I got a complicated feeling whenever I accidentally see the project folder. I'm not sure if I want to continue with it because after the fun and hype I had with it, I know now that building a social media was a huge undertaking. A short lived enthusiasm won't cut it. What I had now is still far away from being a proper, realiable social media to be used for people to enjoy. In short, I was burn out.

2026 - what now?

While now I'm not actively developing anything related to the project from five years ago I occasionally checking out things on Interledger space, like the Interledger payment API, how things going with Web Monetization spec, and so on. I remember now I had few small projects that I share back a while ago that I forgot about until I write this. I even checking out Interledger blockchain-based rival, x402 initiated by Coinbase, though that one isn't exactly one-to-one rival to Interledger since the two focus on two different use case (Interledger focus being agnostic and inclusive while x402 focus on crypto and automated payment made for AI agents). Earlier this year one particular online hackaton that I participated in was memorable, since I create a freelancing platform with blockchain escrow via Solidity with it - something that I wish Interledger could do that too.

As someone who live in a country that a credit card wasn't a mainstream I still thought Interledger (and x402 too) is cool and still want to use them in my future projects. (Unfortunately no ILP wallet available in my region at the moment).

Hackomania 2026

Nicholas Loo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:11:27 +0000

1. Introduce Your Team

We are Team Punch the Monkey — three DigiPen Singapore students who signed up for HackOMania 2026. I'm Nicholas, from the Real-Time Interactive Simulation (RTIS) programme. Benjamin is also from RTIS, and Shu Hng comes from Interactive Media & Game Development (IMGD). Although foreign, we covered the full stack between us and ventured into roles we had never tried.

Winning moment — left to right: Timea Nagy, Benjamin, Nicholas, Shu Hng, and Ioana Chiorean.

2. Hackathon Experience

HackOMania 2026 was a 24-hour sprint, carried across 2 days, and the Interledger Foundation's challenge brief was what drew us in: design a programmable, community-driven emergency fund using Open Payments to collect micro-contributions and disburse aid based on verified disaster triggers. Reading it felt like a genuine engineering puzzle, not a contrived hackathon prompt. The turning point came early from the pre-event when we dug into the Open Payments API and realized the grant negotiation and wallet settlement logic could handle both inbound contributions and automated outbound payouts natively. That unlocked the whole architecture in one shot and gave us clarity on what to do for our 24 hours building.

3. Our Hackathon Background

This was our first hackathon for all three of us. We're students heading into internships soon, and there's something about a hackathon that feels like a rite of passage in computer science that we didn't want to skip. It's one of those experiences you hear about constantly, and we figured: if we're going to do it once before the next chapter starts, let's actually go for it. What surprised us was how different the pressure felt compared to coursework or even crunch on a game project. Every decision is permanent. You don't iterate; you discuss your ideas fast and move forward with resolve. That constraint turned out to be liberating.

4. The Problem We Tackled

When a disaster strikes, the people who need financial help fastest are usually the last to receive it. Traditional emergency funds are slow to mobilize, opaque in their rules, and rarely reach individuals directly. The Interledger Foundation's challenge asked: what if the fund were always funded, always on, and paid out automatically when conditions are verified — with no central authority making the call? That's the core of SafePool. Anyone can contribute before disasters happen, and when real-world disaster conditions are met, payouts flow automatically based on transparent, community-governed rules. Interledger's Open Payments protocol was the right foundation precisely because it's currency-agnostic and borderless. The protocol doesn't care where you are, which made a global fund actually feasible rather than aspirational.

5. Our Tech Solution

SafePool is a single global emergency fund platform, built in 24 hours:

Frontend: Next.js 16 + React 18 + TypeScript, with an interactive 3D globe dashboard (react-globe.gl) rendering live disaster events and contribution activity in real time
Backend/Database: Supabase (Postgres) for transactional flows; ClickHouse (admittedly overkill for a hackathon project) for high-throughput real-time analytics
Payments: Interledger's Open Payments protocol for all contribution and payout rails — grant negotiation, wallet addressing, and cross-border settlement
Realtime Layer: Server-Sent Events (SSE) streaming live activity to the globe
Governance: Community proposal and voting system for transparent, on-chain-style payout rules

The biggest architectural call was committing to a single global fund model rather than per-disaster pools. It simplified the contribution UX dramatically while preserving the rules for payout governance — you're always participating, not waiting for a specific disaster to fund. The trickiest part was handling the Open Payments grant flow for automated outgoing payouts, particularly managing grant expiry cleanly when a disaster trigger fires. We abstracted the payout trigger into a background polling service that checks disaster conditions and initiates payment grants automatically.

And then, somewhere around 3 AM, we also added the monkey.

Punch the Monkey — our 3 AM mascot making his globe debut.

6. The Pitch

We were nervous. We had a live demo, a 3D globe, and a 24-hour build behind us — and we'd only tested the full payment flow successfully a handful of times before walking up. But the moment the judges saw the monkey on the globe, the energy in the room shifted. That idea came out of a very tired 3 AM conversation. We needed something that would make people remember us, and give the demo a personality. It worked better than we expected. The judges enjoyed it, and it became the thing people mentioned when they talked about our project afterwards. Beyond the mascot, the feedback that mattered most was that SafePool felt like a real product concept, not just a protocol demo. Winning first place for the Interledger Foundation Challenge out of 15 teams as first-time hackathon participants is something we're still incredibly grateful for.

7. Mentorship

We had the chance to consult with Timea Nagy, Ioana Chiorean, and Sid Vishnoi from the Interledger team throughout the 24 hours. Rather than just technical guidance, the conversations were more like product reviews. They pushed us to think about what we wanted SafePool to feel like in a real-world scenario, what the payout governance should prioritize, and how to use the Open Payments tooling in a way that served the user experience rather than just satisfying the integration checklist. That clarity helped us make faster decisions during the build and kept us from going down rabbit holes that wouldn't have made the final demo stronger. We're grateful they took the time to come down to this event, especially with other teams competing for their attention.

With the Interledger mentors who helped shape SafePool — left to right: Team Punch the Monkey, Sid Vishnoi, Timea Nagy.

8. What's Next

SafePool is live at safepool-two.vercel.app and open source at github.com/struccomaker/safepool. As we head into our internships, the project is something we're genuinely proud to have shipped. The next meaningful step is moving off the testnet onto real Open Payments wallets and integrating more robust disaster oracle data so the trigger logic doesn't rely on a centralized source. If you're working on Open Payments, disaster relief infrastructure, or just want to hack on the governance layer, we'd love to hear from you.

Reach out to us here:

How to Share Your Hackathon Story

Bibi — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:19:27 +0000

Use this guide to shape your hackathon story, keeping in mind that this is a suggested format, not a requirement. Write as much or as little as feels natural, the goal is an authentic account of your experience.

1. Introduce your team

Share your names, backgrounds, and what each person contributed. Help readers understand who you are before diving into what you built.

Prompts: Where are you from? What do you study or do professionally? How did you come together as a team?

Example: We are PayFlow — three developers who met during the Interledger Hackathon and immediately bonded over a shared frustration with how broken cross-border payments are for freelancers. Amara is a backend engineer from Lagos with five years of fintech experience. Priya is a full-stack developer based in Bangalore who has been building Web3 tooling for the past two years. And I'm Diego, a product engineer from São Paulo who spent three years at a remittance startup watching people lose money to fees on every single transaction.

📷 Team photo — A candid from the event works great. Add a caption with everyone's name.

2. Hackathon experience

Reflect on the hackathon and the challenge you tackled -- what did you learn, and how did it shape your approach going in?

Prompts: Which resources stood out? Was there a moment that shifted how you thought about the challenge?

Example: The overall experience was more hands-on than we expected. The Open Payments API session was the turning point for us. Before that, we had been thinking about our problem in terms of traditional payment rails. Afterwards, we scrapped our original idea entirely and started over.

3. Your hackathon background

Give readers context about your experience with hackathons. Is this your first? Your tenth? What keeps you coming back?

Prompts: What do you enjoy about the format? What surprised you about this one specifically?

Example: Amara and Priya are hackathon veterans. Between them, they've competed in over a dozen events. For me, this was my second. What makes hackathons different from regular sprint work is the permission to be reckless in the best possible way: you prototype things you'd never get sign-off for in a normal product cycle. What surprised us about this one was how much the mentorship changed the experience.

4. The problem you tackled

Lead with the "why." What issue did you set out to solve, and why does it matter? Then explain how Interledger technology made your solution possible.

Prompts: Who is affected by this problem? Why was Interledger the right tool?

Example: Freelancers in the Global South lose between 5% and 12% of every payment to international transfer fees — before taxes, before platform cuts. For someone earning $500 a month, that's money gone. We wanted to build something that made cross-border micropayments fast, cheap, and programmable. Interledger was the foundation: the protocol doesn't care about currency or geography, and the Open Payments standard gave us a clean API to build on top of rather than reinventing settlement logic from scratch.

5. Your tech solution

Walk readers through how your project works: the architecture, the stack, the key decisions, and any pivots along the way.

Prompts: What technologies did you use? What tradeoffs did you make? What would you do differently?

Example: PayFlow is a lightweight invoicing and payment layer built on top of the Open Payments API. A freelancer generates an invoice link in under 30 seconds; the client pays into an Interledger-compatible wallet; the freelancer receives a notification and the funds settle within seconds. We built the frontend in Next.js, used Rafiki as our local ILP node for testing, and integrated with a testnet wallet for the demo. The trickiest part was handling the grant negotiation flow cleanly in the UI — we ended up abstracting that into a single hook that other developers could reuse.

🖼 Screenshots or demo visuals — Add captions so readers know what they're looking at. A short demo clip or Loom works great here too.

6. The pitch

What was it like presenting to the judges and other participants? Be honest — vulnerability makes for great reading.

Prompts: Were you nervous? What questions came up? What did you learn from the feedback?

Example: We were nervous. We had 10 minutes and a live demo that we'd only tested successfully three times. One of the judges asked us how we'd handle regulatory compliance across different jurisdictions, and honestly, we didn't have a clean answer. But the question itself was clarifying. It told us exactly where the product needed to grow. The feedback from other teams after the presentation was just as valuable as the judges' comments.

7. Mentorship

Reflect on your interactions with mentors from Interledger and beyond.

Prompts: Was there a conversation that shifted your direction? What's one insight you're still thinking about?

Example: We had a session with one of the Interledger mentors on day two that saved us probably six hours of debugging. We'd been fighting with the incoming payment polling logic, and within 20 minutes he spotted that we were misreading the grant expiry behavior in the spec. Beyond the technical help, something he said stuck with us: "Don't build for the protocol. Build for the person who will never know the protocol exists." That became our north star for the rest of the hackathon.

8. What's next?

Are you continuing to develop your solution? Share your next steps or what you're taking with you even if the project pauses.

Prompts: What would v2 look like? Are you pursuing partners, funding, or open source contributors?

Example: We're continuing. The plan for the next 90 days is to move off the testnet and onboard five real freelancers as beta users — people in our own networks who are already dealing with this problem. We are exploring whether there's a path to building PayFlow as an open source tool that other developers can deploy for their own communities. If you're building on Open Payments and want to collaborate, we'd love to hear from you.

🏆 Closing photo — team with prize — End on a high note, celebrate the win!

The Interledger Hackathon Team

Break the Pattern: IWD Medellín 2026

Marian Villa 🇨🇴 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:40:56 +0000

There’s something we’re still not saying enough in tech:

The system works exactly as it was designed.

And if we want to change what we’re seeing, participating in the system isn’t enough.

We have to rewrite it.

Medellín: a fork in the system

IWD Medellín 2026 wasn’t just an event. It was a fork.

A moment where we chose not to follow the default flow.

Communities that usually operate in parallel decided to synchronize:

To build something together:

Resilient. Coordinated. Purpose-driven.

What we talked about

⚡ Technology as a tool for emancipation

Using tech not just to optimize processes, but to redistribute power.

⚡ Web + AI in production

The question is no longer “how do I build?”

It’s: how do I capture value in a system that’s already running?

The web has changed. If you don’t understand that, you’re building for a past that no longer exists.

⚡ AI in DevTools

Friction in development is shifting.
Debugging is no longer just reading logs.

It’s interacting with systems that understand context. That changes how we learn, iterate, and think about code.

⚡ Multi-agent systems (ADK)

We’re moving from applications to ecosystems of decisions.
Multiple agents that collaborate, negotiate, and execute.

This isn’t just technical. It’s a paradigm shift.

⚡ AI in HealthTech

This is where it gets real.

When AI enters healthcare, errors stop being bugs. They become consequences.

Break the Pattern (for real)

In this amazing celebration:

People showed up.
Speakers shared.
Communities collaborated.
Ideas emerged.

Break the Pattern isn’t an event. It’s what we do next.

Want to keep building with us?

If you're exploring how to design more open, inclusive, and interoperable systems, come join the conversation:

👉 Join the Interledger community: https://interledger.org/community
👉 Connect with builders around the world: http://bit.ly/ilfslackcommunity

UCT Financial Innovation Hub — ILF Grant Final Report

Allan Davids — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:45:40 +0000

Brief Project Description

At the Financial Innovation Hub. our focus is on providing world-class education in financial technology to students at the University of Cape Town. Through our partnership with Interledger, we are developing and implementing an open payments curriculum for students. Outside of UCT, we are also working to expand Interledger's reach among students in South Africa and at other universities through workshops, bootcamps, and hackathons. You can find our initial progress report, here.

Project Update

MPhil Class of 2025 and Scholarships

We concluded another successful year for our MPhil class. We had a really vibrant class this year and many standout moments. My favourite one involves the class project that our 2025 class took on, developing a solution called Nkadime, a decentralised micro-lending platform leveraging Open Banking APIs, alternative credit scoring, and XRPL smart contracts. Here I am with the class of 2025.

With the support of Interledger we were able to provide scholarships to 7 students this year! Here are some of our bursary recipients talking about their future aspirations.

Open Payments Workshop and Hackathon

This year, we ran our second iteration of the UCT / Interledger Open Payments Bootcamp and Hackathon, where we introduce students to Open Payments over 5 days during the mid-year break and challenge them to develop a fully functional application at a full-day hackathon. This year’s iteration had many highlights, including

Increasing the number of students who attended from 40 to 70
Increasing representation of students to having students from 4 different universities attending

Here is a post-hackathon photo with everyone.

This hackathon is a formative moment for the students, as it represents the first experience of a hackathon for most attendees. This year’s winning solution, Direla, used open payments to turn smartphones into a POS terminal, allowing merchants to accept payments via NFC, QR codes, and WhatsApp aliases. Dylan, a member of Direla and Interledger Bursary Recipient, did a blog post on the forum about his experience. Here is also a photo of the winning team with Raul and I.

If you haven't seen it already, here is a great short video about the 2025 Hackathon.

Women in Tech Campaign

We all know that the financial services and technology sectors have historically been under-representative of women. As a result, empowering women to be successful in the FinTech space is something very important to us. Under the guidance of Lindi, our Hub Manager, this year, we wanted to showcase and tell the stories of women doing amazing things in Tech. This led to the “Women Stories in Tech” campaign we ran around Women’s Day. In this series, we featured seven interviews with inspiring women working in tech. We ran the campaign on LinkedIn, and the interviews are available on our YouTube channel, here. We kicked off the campaign speaking to the ILF's own Matseliso Thabane!

Practitioner seminars

An important part of our degree programme are our practitioner seminars, where we invite people doing amazing things in the FinTech space to give a talk to our students telling them about their work and sharing their experiences and life lessons from working in the space. These sessions are tremendously insightfull for our students and help to connect them to what is happening in the FinTech space. This year we were delighted to host 10 practitioner seminars, roughly one a month for the academic calendar. Some of our notable speakers included: Brenton Naicker, Principal & Head of Growth at CVVC, Mark McChlery, Co-founder and Chief Data & Analytics Officer at PayJustNow, the largest Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) company in South Africa and Thomas Brennan: CEO & Co-founder at Franc (who won SA FinTec of the Year at the recent SA FinTech awards), a savings and investment app, aimed at increasing financial inclusion through reducing the barriers to saving and investment. Here is Brenton delivering his practitioner seminar.

Some areas where we fell short and lessons learned

Despite these success, we also had some goals we didn't achieve and learnt some important lessons in the process.

The major being the fact that we wanted to be successful in putting out more academic research on payments. To enable this, we hired a research fellow, but she could only work on a part-time basis and that slowed us down a bit. That being said, we did manage to produce one paper exploring the current payment system reforms in South Africa and it's implications for financial inclusion.

Another important lesson for us what that as your ambitions grow, so should your team. We are a lean team, currently with only 5 members. We felt that this year given the increasing scope of our work and started to hit a resource constraint relative to our time vs our ambitions. We'll be growing the team next year to help us scale!

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

Scholarships

Darryl Nyamayaro and Siphiwe Bogatsu, both Interledger scholarship recipients in 2024, have been making waves with their startup iDini, a platform which helps people manage their insurance policies. This is an important use case in South Africa where the average household has three to five policies and where the policy lapse rate is 55%. This means that for many people, a single missed payment renders their policy null and void. iDini helps people manage their policies and keep their insurance.

Hackathons and student innovation

Continuing with Darryl and Siphiwe's story, not only were both of them Interledger scholarship recipients, but they also won the 2024 UCT/Interledger Hackathon for iDini. Here is a photo of Siphiwe, Darryl and the rest of the iDini team from our most recent student start-up pitch night.

We've seen a similar success story in 2025. The 2025 winning team (containing two Interledger scholarship recipients) have continued to develop their hackathon-winning idea, Direla, and have gone on to recently take 2nd place at the Africa Tech Week MCP Hackathon. They are now in the early fundraising phase as they look to develop a full MVP.

Many of the other Interledger scholarship recipient for 2025 have also been pursuing start-up ventures. Keba and Victor, are developing ProcureLink, a blockchain procurement system that ensures tamper-proof records, transparent bidding, and automated contract management and Marc is developing CaseCleared,a legal finance platform that tokenizes pending invoices and settlements, giving law firms and expert witnesses faster access to cash. Here is a photo of Keba and Victor from our most recent pitch-night ...

... and another of Marc, pitching CaseCleared to the audience.

Arguably, the biggest success we've had comes from Gregory Andrews, another one of our students, who has had tremendous success with his start-up, Tata iMali, which provides low-cost point of sale (POS) machines to vendors. Tata iMali was named of one of the FinTech Startups to watch in South Africa by TechCabal and Greg successfully raised seed funding from no other than Interledger's own Stefan Thomas as an angel investor.

These stories highlight the vibrancy of innovation at the Hub, the critical role of the hackathon as the idea bed for many startups,, and the quality of these ideas, despite the young age of the founders, all of whom are students. Most importantly, all of this would not be possible without the Interledger scholarships for our students, many of whom would otherwise not be able to afford the costs of tuition.

We look forward to building on this success into 2026!

Representation in our degree

We've always taken pride in the extent of representation in our students, with 51% of the students we've so far admitted into the degree across the 8 years of its inception being women, an especially marginalized group in the FinTech. Despite our best efforts, the share of women in our degree fell to less than 25% last year.

To address this, we did several things, most notably

Sponsoring and working closely with the Women in Computer Science (WiCS) student society at UCT to increase our visibility with women on campus
Undertook a Women in Tech campaign (details in the previous section)

Given these efforts, I'm proud to say that we've more than double the representation of women in our class of 2026, with women making up 50% of the cohort!

Recognition for our work

In November, we had the great honour of winning an award for Enchancing Financial Inclusion for the Hub's work in conjunction with the ILF. This award affirms the vital role universities play in advancing inclusive financial innovation through nurturing and empowering young people to build the technologies that will power the financial system of the future: one that is open, inclusive and shaped by the needs of the communities it serves.

Here is a photo of Lindi receiving the award on stage ...

... and another of Lindi and Greg (who was also at the awards, having been a nominee in a different category himself - once again showcasing the talent of our students!)

Communications and Marketing

We’ve been fortunate to have had a lot of media coverage highlighting the work we’ve been doing at the Hub.

This year, our hackathon received a lot of attention, including coverage on MSN South Africa BizCommunity, FinTech News Africa, ITWeb, Lifestyle and Tech, Silicon Africa and Connecting Africa. Media analytics provided to us from a marketing firm told us that the combined media following our hackathon reached a staggering 545,000 people!

We also did a lot of work to create more awareness about the NextGen Education Grant among South African universities. One example of this was an interview that Lindi did on ENCA, one of the largest news channels in South Africa. You can watch that here. We believe these efforts will see more South African universities become part of the ILF ecosystem going forward.

Our students have also been in the news. Greg, who I mentioned earlier, has been making waves with his start-up, Tata iMali, and profiled in an article by UCT, and Tata iMali was named one of the FinTech Startups to watch in South Africa by TechCabal.

Darryl and Siphiwe have been highlighted by UCT for placing 7th (out of 200 student startups!) in the 2025 Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) Entrepreneurship Intervarsity Competition!

Finally, UCT also did two features on us this year,one highlighting a pitch night we held for all of the student startups we are currently working to incubate at the Hub and another more recent one profiling our successes this year.

What’s Next?

Extended Hackathon reach

The hackathon has quickly become one of our flagship initiatives with the Interledger Foundation, attracting over 110 student participants across its first two years. In 2025, we took the vital step of inviting students from other Western Cape universities, which significantly enriched the diversity of perspectives and ideas. In 2026, we will extend this momentum nationally by making the hackathon accessible to students from disadvantaged regions across South Africa.

New coursework

Given the rapid rate at which technology is evolving, we will starting an extensive refresh of our academic programme over the next two years. Next year, we'll re-fresh one of our course Digital Economics. The revised course will be structured around four broad themes: digital payments and interoperability, digital platforms and market structures, financial products, and artificial intelligence.
By approaching digital payments, platforms, financial products, and AI through the lens of developing country realities, the course ensures that issues of equity and inclusion are placed at the centre of analysis. Over the coming years, this course will expose hundreds of UCT students to these debates, helping to build a pipeline of graduates able to engage critically with the design of digital financial systems in South Africa and beyond. A one-page brief outlining the structure of the course is included as an annexure.

Innovation that builds on Open Payments

Several promising Interledger-based ideas emerged from the 2024 and 2025 student hackathons. These ideas, however, did not progress beyond the hackathon, mainly due to the lack of structured support and encouragement.

Conversely, the Hub runs a successful nine-month pre-incubator programme, where we assist aspiring student entrepreneurs in developing their start-ups. Our start-ups have been highly successful in fundraising, having raised $1.48 million so far.

Going forward, we want to work to combine these two worlds. We will work to incubate a start-up building on Interledger, ideally one from the hackathon itself, each year, and provide them with the business development and technical support (from our technical specialists) to grow their idea. The goal being to create a pipeline of student start-ups building on Interledger, who in the future would be eligible to apply for the digital financial services grants.

Interledger Foundation Launches “Interledger on Campus” Mini-Grant Program to Support Student-Led Initiatives in Open Payments

Julaire Hall — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:43:59 +0000

Up to USD $5,000 grants available to university student clubs exploring open payments, digital financial access, and financial health.

Interledger on Campus is a brand new mini-grant program designed to support student-led, club-level initiatives at accredited universities around the world. The program will award up to USD $5,000 in grant funding to student organizations exploring open payments, interoperability, digital financial access, and financial health through hands-on, peer-driven activities.

Building on the Foundation’s Interledger NextGen Higher Education program, the Interledger on Campus grant program places students at the center of innovation, empowering campus clubs to design and deliver engagement activities that bring open payment concepts to life.

Chief Program Officer, Chris Lawrence, states that “student clubs are powerful engines for experimentation and leadership. Interledger on Campus is about giving students the resources and autonomy to explore how open, interoperable payment systems can expand access and inclusion, right where learning and innovation happen.”

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis from March 16 through July 31, 2026, with priority review for projects planning implementation for the first half of the year. Projects are expected to run for no longer than 3 months and must be student-led, with required institutional support for fund management and project oversight.

Applicants will be required to submit a short application, including a two-page concept note, a budget and timeline document outlining key milestones, and an institutional letter of support from an accredited higher education institution confirming fund management and oversight.

To learn more about this grant program, students can download the program factsheet and view our resources.

Apply online at Submittable.

Future of Open Payments: Bridging Finance, Technology, and Law for Financial Inclusion — ILF Grant Progress Report

Aleksandra Asscheman — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:59:02 +0000

Brief Project Description

The Open Payments Innovation Lab (aka Future of Open Payments: Bridging Finance, Technology and Law for Financial Inclusion) is a 5-ECTS interdisciplinary lab at The Hague University of Applied Sciences where law and finance students design real-world solutions to global payment challenges using open payment technologies. Working in interdisciplinary teams, students address actual financial inclusion problems of their choice while learning about the Interledger Protocol and navigating economic and regulatory challenges. The lab features 8 weekly interactive workshops, followed by independent work on capstone projects with 3 coaching sessions for feedback. Students present their solutions to a panel of industry experts at a final pitch event.

Project Update

The Open Payments Innovation Lab is now live and accepting student applications for our March 2026 launch. The response has been very good: within 4 days, we received 40 student registrations and the number is still growing.

The course infrastructure is now operational. We have designed a dedicated website www.openpaymentslab.com, which now serves as the central hub for course information and registration. The complete 12-week course structure has been finalized and published, including all session topics, capstone deliverable requirements, and evaluation criteria. Institutional approval for 5 ECTS extracurricular credits has been obtained, formalizing the lab as an official study component at The Hague University of Applied Sciences.

Recruitment is ongoing through multiple channels. Student ambassadors from the LAW programme and ILSA student association promoted the lab through peer networks, which proved particularly effective. We reached program managers directly in International & European Law, International Financial Management & Control, and International Business, and distributed information through both the Blockchain minor and Tax, Banking and Financial Regulation minor. Students are registering from both law and finance backgrounds, creating the interdisciplinary mix the lab was designed for.

Current work focuses on three priorities. First, finalizing learning materials for the eight weekly sessions, including a pre-course survey to establish baseline knowledge and running the workshops. Second, coordinating with external experts for (co-)leading different workshops. Third, planning the final pitch event and assembling the panel of experts to evaluate the final capstone projects and selecting the winner. The first introductory workshop will run on March 20, 2026.

The challenges we have encountered so far have been related to internal processes. Embedding the Open Payments Innovation Lab into two existing minors, Blockchain and Tax, Banking and Financial Regulation, has proven more complicated due to the non-compulsory nature of this component and its interdisciplinary character which requires integration in the curricula of two different departments. Therefore, the decision has been made for this year to pilot the Open Payments Innovation Lab as an extra-curricular project and resume the discussion on embedding it into the curriculum upon successful completion of the pilot.

One logistical challenge has been scheduling workshops at a time convenient for students coming from different programmes. Year 3-4 students are also known for working part-time on days free from compulsory classes, so finding appropriate times to retain attendance of students expressing interest is an ongoing effort. The solution we are considering is to run a poll at the first introductory workshop and schedule sessions at a time convenient for the majority of participants. We will take a more flexible approach with the coaching sessions, making individual appointments with teams.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

The Open Payments Innovation Lab primarily serves Year 3-4 bachelor students enrolled in law and finance programs at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. The lab specifically targets students who lack coding backgrounds but seek to work at the intersection of finance, technology, and regulation.

Current registrants include 70% women, reflecting strong participation from a group that has been historically underrepresented in technology and finance-related fields. The Hague University of Applied Sciences has a highly international student body representing over 125 nationalities, and the lab's recruitment through multiple programs (International & European Law, International Financial Management & Control, International Business) ensures participation from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

This initiative supports the Interledger Foundation's mission in several key ways:

Educating students on the potential of ILP and open payment technologies: The Open Payments Innovation Lab introduces the Interledger Protocol to students in finance and law curricula where open payment technologies are rarely addressed. Through eight weekly workshops, students learn how open payment technologies can provide financial access to underserved populations. These students will enter careers in regulatory agencies, financial institutions, and policy organizations equipped to understand and advocate for interoperable payment systems.
Encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation: The capstone project requirement ensures that all students design financial solutions that reduce barriers to financial access worldwide. Working in interdisciplinary teams, students will address concrete challenges and analyse legal and financial considerations of their proposed solutions.
Expanding the talent pipeline: Open Payments Innovation Lab trains future regulators, compliance officers, policy advisors, and financial professionals who will shape regulatory frameworks, compliance standards, and institutional adoption decisions. By reaching non-technical students, we are expanding who gets to participate in conversations about the future of payments and ensuring that diverse perspectives inform the development of open payment systems.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

Progress is reported against the three core objectives outlined in the original proposal:

Objective 1: Integrating ILP and open payments into legal and financial education
The full 12-week course structure has been completed and published. All session topics, capstone deliverable requirements, and evaluation criteria are now available on the dedicated website www.openpaymentslab.com. The course provides a holistic approach where students explore the technical architecture of open payments (ILP), payment economics, and regulatory challenges (PSD3, MiCA, AML/KYC, data protection), with sessions structured to integrate technical and regulatory perspectives throughout.

Objective 2: Advancing financial inclusion through innovation
All capstone projects are required to address real-world financial inclusion challenges using ILP and open payment technologies. The capstone framework has been finalized with five core components: solution design, technical architecture, legal analysis, financial analysis and impact assessment.

Objective 3: Developing a talent pipeline in open payments
Within four days of opening registration (March 9-12, 2026), 40 students applied, exceeding our initial target of 24-30 students. A pre-course survey has been designed to assess student background knowledge and establish baseline metrics. A post-course survey will measure learning outcomes, track career interests in fintech/regulatory agencies/payment service providers, and gather feedback for program refinement.

Communications and Marketing

A special panel on the Future of Payments was organized as part of the annual Beyond Cash, Code & Monetary Power event, hosted by the New Finance Research Group on January 30, 2026. The panel focused on the changing mix of public and private money and how to organize trust, scalability, and interoperability in payment systems. Discussions highlighted the importance of harmonized regulatory frameworks as a key enabler of interoperability, while pointing to legal and regulatory challenges that continue to hinder cross-border integration. This event raised awareness and generated student interest in current payment system issues and served as a launch platform for announcing the Open Payments Innovation Lab.

The website www.openpaymentslab.com launched in March 2026 and serves as the central hub for lab information, week-by-week course structure, and student registration. The registration form feeds directly into a Google Sheet for tracking applications. Three blog posts have been published to build awareness and provide context for the lab's focus areas:

"From Interledger Summit to Our Classroom: Why We're Building This"- reflecting on insights from the Interledger Summit and the vision for bringing open payments education to The Hague University of Applied Sciences
"What Will the Payment Ecosystem of the Future Look Like?" - drawing on perspectives from the January 30, 2026 panel discussion during the Beyond Cash, Code & Monetary Power event.
"Financial Inclusion Isn't Just About Access—It's About What Comes Next" - examining how open payment technologies can address barriers to financial inclusion globally.

A separate page dedicated to the Open Payments Innovation Lab is being created on the New Finance Research Group website to provide additional institutional visibility and connect the lab to ongoing research activities in digital finance.

What’s Next?

March-June 2026: Running the pilot
The Open Payments Innovation Lab will run from March 20, 2026 to June 11, 2026. The first eight weeks will feature weekly interactive workshops covering ILP fundamentals, regulatory frameworks, financial inclusion challenges, payment economics, and solution design. Students will form interdisciplinary teams during Week 2 and begin developing their capstone projects starting in Week 9, with three coaching sessions per team to provide feedback on project scoping, solution design, legal analysis, and final presentations.

Final pitch event and evaluation
The lab will conclude on June 11, 2026 with a final pitch event where teams present their capstone projects to a panel of industry experts. Post-course evaluations will be conducted to measure learning outcomes, assess student satisfaction, and gather feedback for program improvement.

Community Support

The Open Payments Innovation Lab would greatly benefit from ILF community members who can contribute to teaching sessions designed for non-technical students. We are seeking experts who can commit to co-teaching Introduction to Interledger Protocol (planned for March 27, 2026) and leading ILP Experience Lab (planned for April 17, 2026). Additionally, co-teaching the Financial Inclusion session either in person or online by telling the story of real-life projects would be very beneficial.

We are also looking for experts who would like to be involved as evaluators at the final pitch event on June 11, 2026.

Looking forward, we would very much appreciate support in connecting high-performing students with internship opportunities or applied research graduation projects in organizations working with ILP and open payment systems. This would provide valuable pathways for students to continue their engagement beyond the Open Payments Innovation Lab.

March 2026: Discover New Grant Opportunities with Interledger

Ayesha Ware — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:39:35 +0000

All the latest news and opportunities from the Interledger Community

New Grant Opportunities

We have three new grant opportunities opening in the next few weeks!

Interledger on Campus is a new mini-grant offering up to $5,000 to support student-led initiatives exploring Open Payments, interoperability, and digital financial inclusion at universities worldwide. This grant will open on March 16.

The Open Payments SDK grant will provide $5,000–$50,000 awards to research and improve the developer experience and make it easier for applications and e-commerce platforms to integrate Open Payments. This grant opens on April 1.

Building on the success of our six-month Ambassador Program, the expanded Interledger Fellowship will support innovators, researchers, and community leaders advancing Open Payments and digital financial access. Selected fellows will receive $72,000 over a 12-month program to pursue their projects.

Full details will be available on our website soon. We are excited to see what our community will build next. 🚀

Community News

Community Call

Missed our February call? Take a closer look at several projects funded through Grant for the Web, featuring demos and updates from grantees building tools for the open web. Listen to the call recording or read more about The Social Web Foundation, A New Social and WriteFreely. Full details available on the blog. The recap of this month’s community call will be available soon.

Alliance DFA

This midterm report shares insights from the project with Policy Activation grantee, Alliance DFA, highlighting early findings on how instant payment systems can better support fintech participation and broaden financial access. Read the blog.

Community Activity

During the week of March 30-April 3, begin your search for small, well-hidden surprises tucked into channels, docs, or code. Hidden in plain sight is a scrambled clue for those who want to untangle the very first treasure: PNEMPTSONYAEE. If you cracked this first clue, join us on Slack and reach out to Bibi Souza (Community Manager) to be included in the hidden treasure hunt. Happy hunting!

Tech Bytes

Off the Ledger

In the spirit of Women’s Month, members of our engineering team — Sabine Schaller, Ioana Chiorean, Melissa Henderson, Nagy Timea, and Sarah Jones came together for an open conversation about their experiences as women and leaders in tech.

Watch the replay on YouTube.

Web Monetization

The year is off to a strong start with updates focused on improving the experience for both users and publishers. Recent progress includes expanding browser support, enhancing performance, and developing new resources to help creators and platforms integrate Web Monetization more easily. Read the full update.

Rafiki Updates

We have the first Rafiki release of 2026, v2.3.0-beta! This update introduces a new Open Payments feature and improvements for integrators. Read the full blog to learn more.

HackOMania

Interledger Foundation was proud to join HackOMania 2026 as a Platinum Sponsor. Team members Ioana, Sid, and Timea mentored participants throughout the event, with Timea also serving as a judge.

Our challenge invited teams to explore how Open Payments could help communities prepare for natural disasters by pooling funds and enabling fast, transparent payouts when emergencies occur. It was inspiring to see builders tackle real-world challenges with innovative solutions.

Join us on Slack to connect, ask questions, and be a part of the community.

If you want to receive our newsletter directly to your inbox, subscribe here and stay informed with the newest updates from our community!

NextGen Higher Education USIU-AFRICA — ILF Grant Progress Report

Brooke Stanley Agina — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:14:00 +0000

Brief Project Description

The "Design Your Future Integrated Innovation Pipeline Programme" (DYF IPP) at USIU-Africa is an experimental and educational hub that supports open payment technologies by integrating the Interledger Protocol (ILP) and Rafiki into the Innovation and Incubation Center Pipeline and by collaborating with Financial Inclusion. The project addresses the "fragmented financial landscape" in East Africa, moving beyond theoretical banking toward decentralized, interoperable networks that utilize packetized value transfer to reduce costs and settlement times for regional trade.

Project Update

The project is currently active and on track following the completion of different phases based on the activities we are running in the program. We have successfully enrolled 57 high-potential students from diverse African nations. A significant milestone was the commencement of technical and Financial inclusion sessions in phase 1. In phase 2, we focused on students building their projects, resulting in 6 main projects based on the ILP. We will move to the 3rd phase, where the projects will proceed into the market to understand the market value chain.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)

With the Diverse community of students at USIU-Africa from different parts and regions of Africa, for example, we have students from Bukinafaso and Ethiopia, specifically from Tigray, who have faced challenges with financial inclusion and are using the Interledger Protocol to address them. Here are their brief stories

Story from Merhawit Tesfay Kassa from Tigray, Ethiopia
In times of hardship, we often discover the true measure of those around us. Recently, in Shire, friends in Canada made a generous donation to help families who have lost so much. But because our banking system is currently out of reach, getting that help to those in need required finding a path through a "liquidity trap."
Unfortunately, not everyone sees a crisis as a call to service. A portion of the funds 8% was lost to an intermediary who chose to take a "tax" on this relief. It was a heavy moment for those of us witnessing it, standing before families who are already carrying so much weight.
Yet, this story is defined just as much by those who refused to let greed take root.
In the midst of the struggle, we found a different spirit. Business owners in Axum and Shire, including Muqur Damobile, Berhaley Construction Materials, Kuda Cafe, Frew (Walia Beer Distributor), and Temesgen in Shire, stepped forward to offer support with total integrity. They moved the funds we needed, taking nothing for themselves, acting simply as neighbors helping neighbors.
We are learning from this. We are finding ways to build a direct, secure, and protected aid bridge. Our goal is simple: to ensure that the kindness of donors arrives exactly where it is intended, into the hands of those who are fighting to survive.

Story from Fadila Vannessa Issifou from Ougadougou, Bukinafao
Every month, something as simple as receiving money from my family becomes a stressful process I have to repeat again and again. They send me more than $500 for my living expenses, and every semester they send over $2,000 for my tuition. But getting that money into my hands is never simple. Because of my age and the type of bank account I’m allowed to have, there are strict limits on how much I can withdraw, only about 400,000 West African CFA at a time. That means even paying my tuition becomes a struggle because the payment has to be split and handled in multiple steps. Banks are expensive anyway, with high fees, and they still don’t solve the real problem: I can’t receive the money directly on M-Pesa because of the currency difference. So every time my family sends money, I go through the same exhausting routine using Western Union or Ria, going to an agent, collecting the cash, depositing it into M-Pesa, and only then being able to pay what I need. It’s slow, expensive, and frustrating, and I have to relive it every single month and every semester. When I learned about the Interledger Protocol, it honestly felt like a glimpse of relief. The idea that different payment systems could actually connect and move money directly between them without all these limits, middle steps, and fees made me realize how unnecessarily hard this process has been. If systems like M-Pesa were connected through Interledger, receiving money from my family could finally be simple, immediate, and fair. For someone like me, that wouldn’t just be convenient, it would remove a burden I’ve been carrying every month.

Progress on Objectives, Key Activities

Examine current open and Interportable payment system solutions, including their strengths and weaknesses.
Under this objective, we covered our activity focused on Financial Foundations and regulatory compliance. This helped students explore existing payment systems in Kenya and some parts of Africa. These payment systems include Mobile payments such as M-Pesa, Banks such as NCBA, and blockchain ledgers such as Binance.

Learn about open payment innovations across the front end and back end, including digital wallets, mobile payments, tokenization, and emerging payment infrastructure.
During our activity, where we were looking at Finacial Foundations and regulatory compliance we had a subtopic CBK Guidelines and Fast Payment Systems (FPS) Compliance we touched on learning about frontend and backend open payments innovations, including digital wallets, mobile payments, tokenization, and emerging payment infrastructure, such as the licencing the use of the Stablecoins by the Central Bank of Kenya.

Assemble multidisciplinary teams to develop selected Ideas into viable prototypes based on Open Payments Standards and Interledger Protocol.

Six teams were created during our Innovation Activities, which happen every Tuesday Night from 7 pm to 9 pm EAT. To give a brief on some of the projects created so far.

Muungano:
Problem: Cross-border payments within Africa remain slow, expensive, and unreliable due to dependence on USD-intermediated correspondent banking systems. This infrastructure often fails in low-liquidity currency corridors, leaving millions of intra-African migrant workers facing high remittance costs, long settlement times, and limited financial resources when transfers stall

Solution: Muungano Payroll infrastructure.
Muungano is an Interledger Protocol (ILP)-native payroll infrastructure that enables employers to disburse salaries, convert currencies, and route cross-border payments to workers’ designated accounts in seconds, without relying on the traditional USD-based correspondent banking.

Trip
Problem: More than 8 million people in Tigray remain trapped in a liquidity crisis where bank accounts are effectively locked by a physical cash bottleneck and a 92% poverty rate. This structural collapse, driven by post-conflict stagnation and a predatory black market, will lead to total economic irreversible paralysis if the circulation of value is not restored immediately.

The Solution: The TRIP Engine
The Tigray Regional Interledger Platform (TRIP) restores the economy by using an FX arbitrage layer to incentivize the Central Bank to increase the money supply. By routing digital value through local "connector nodes" via internet-free USSD technology, we bypass infrastructure fragility to ensure money circulates instantly, legally, and sustainably.

Koshi
Problem: Africa’s 200+ payment systems do not talk to each other, forcing intra-African traders to pay up to 8% in fees and wait 2-3 days to move money across borders, the highest cost and slowest settlement time in the world.

Solution: Koshi is a payment routing infrastructure built on the Interledger Protocol that connects Africa’s fragmented payment systems, allowing intra-African traders to send cross-border payments in under 30 seconds directly from WhatsApp, with no new app or account required. Because Koshi does not ask anyone to change what they already use, it simply makes everything work together.

Jantasphere
Problem: Kenya receives nearly 3 million short-stay foreign visitors each year -including about 2.4 million international tourists, 30,000–40,000 international students, and over 500,000 business travelers and regional traders. In 2024 alone, international tourism generated roughly USD 3.5 billion, with visitors spending an average of USD 1,400–1,500 per trip. Yet a major portion of everyday local spending, transport, beauty services, errands, repairs, photography, guides, and other small services remains difficult to access because visitors must convert cash, pay high foreign exchange fees, or register local mobile money accounts such as M-Pesa. At the same time, thousands of skilled youth and students providing these services remain digitally invisible, disconnected from structured demand and global payment systems.

Solution: JantaSphere Global Pay addresses this gap by combining an AI-powered hyperlocal service marketplace with Interledger Protocol (ILP) to enable seamless cross-border payments. Using intelligent matching and geospatial clustering, JantaSphere connects visitors to verified nearby service providers within minutes. At the same time, ILP allows tourists, international students, and traders to pay instantly in their own currency without needing local SIM cards or cash conversions. Local providers receive payments through familiar channels such as mobile money, enabling faster, safer, and more affordable transactions. By connecting global visitors with Africa’s informal service economy, JantaSphere transforms fragmented local services into a trusted digital marketplace that unlocks income opportunities, improves access to services, and strengthens inclusive urban economies.

Nexus Give
Problem: Billions of people worldwide remain excluded from global digital commerce because they lack internationally accepted payment methods such as credit cards or PayPal.This fragmentation between local financial systems and international payment networks prevents individuals from purchasing goods online, accessing digital services, or participating in global economic platforms.

Solution: NexusPay addresses this challenge by building a payment interoperability platform that connects local fintech systems to global digital platforms using the Interledger Protocol (ILP). Through a plugin-based payment gateway and platform integration tools, NexusPay enables digital services such as e-commerce stores, freelance marketplaces, and global SaaS platforms to accept payments from users who rely on local payment methods.

Lumina
Problem: Traditional payment rails such as Stripe/PayPal are built for large, infrequent purchases and carry high fixed fees, typically $0.30 + 2.9%. This economic limitation forces digital providers to adopt a "Subscription-Only" model, which poses challenges such as Access Inequality, Subscription Fatigue, and High Churn.

Solution: Lumina-ILP acts as a middleware gateway that enables Money at the Speed of Data. Unlike traditional gateways, it supports sub-cent transactions as low as $0.0001 with negligible overhead and instant settlement.

Communications and Marketing

We launched the NextGen Higher Education USIU-Africa Grant at a colorful event on 22nd October 2025, which was published on platforms including LinkedIn, Instagram, and University World News Presser.

We featured in the University World News presser in November 2025, where our faculty shared insights on developing an "entrepreneurial mindset" through ILP. Additionally, the project has been featured in the university's "Campus This Week" publication.
https://www.usiu.ac.ke/4156/press-release-usiu-africa-launches-groundbreaking-fintech-program-in-partnership-interledger-foundation/
We also branded T-shirts and hoodies and partnered in the USIU-Africa Innovation Challenge, a hackathon that focuses on clearly bringing out the brand of our partnership.
We have also posted about the partnership on our individual socials, highlighting how it has gone so far.

What’s Next?

For the remainder of the grant period through September 2026, we will focus on finalizing our objectives:

Discover how technological innovation is reshaping traditional payment systems.
72 Hour hackathon 12th -14th March 2026 and innovation challenge finals on 26th June 2026
Support the innovators to complete the market value chain analysis and build 6 Prototypes in the next 4 months
A workshop to be held on 26th June 2026 to explore the role of open payment systems in implementing the National Payment Systems Strategy
Provide participants with real-world entrepreneurial experience from ideation to
execution in offering digital financial services to MSMEs.
Foster a culture of innovation and collaboration in financial inclusion across departments, teams, projects, and internal and external USIU Africa communities. 8. Support the development of digital financial innovations and platforms.
Promote the adoption of open payment systems by MSMEs and Chamas for social impact
Mentor students from Business and IT interested in careers to support the deployment of the Fast Payment System (FPS) in Kenya

Community Support

As we move into the startup acceleration phase, we would appreciate connections to the broader Interledger community to support mentorship for our student entrepreneurs. Technical guidance on optimizing Rafiki for high-throughput processing in a "hub-and-spoke" innovation model would also be highly beneficial for our technical lead and students.

Additional Comments

We would like to have some of the community members building using the protocol to come share with our students on how they have managed to build sustainable models using the protocol.

A Valentine's Day with Web Monetization

Bibi — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:04:10 +0000

Vancouver in February is grey, damp, and deeply committed to JavaScript.

This month’s Valentine’s Day edition of VanJS felt different though. There were pink accents, chocolate on the snack table, and that slightly chaotic pre talk buzz that only happens when developers are caffeinated and curious.

I’ve been running VanJS for a while now, and every time I look out at the room, I’m reminded why I keep doing it.

This community leans in.

A Valentine’s Theme: Relationships on the Web

For this edition, Interledger Foundation sponsored the event, which made it the perfect setting to talk about Web Monetization. Valentine’s Day is about relationships, and the web desperately needs a healthier one between creators and value.

TL/DR: So what is Web Monetization?

At its core, it is an open standard that allows websites to receive tiny, continuous payments from users as they consume content. Not ads. Not a hard paywall. Not a subscription you forget about until your credit card reminds you. It streams value in the background, in real time.

That's the theory. The real magic happened after the talk.

As soon as we wrapped, I barely made it back to the pizza table before people started coming up to me. Not polite head nods. Actual, animated curiosity. Developers wanted to understand how it could work in their own projects. Debating about documentation sites, open source repos and AI agents paying for API calls per millisecond.

A few conversations turned almost philosophical. What does it mean if value on the web becomes as streamable as video? How would that reshape incentives? Could we design systems that reward contribution without turning everything into a growth hack?

When Developers Start Connecting Dots

That is what I love about VanJS. It is never just about frameworks. Underneath the surface, there is always a deeper question about what kind of internet we are building.

Running this meetup has shown me that developers care about sustainability and fairness more than we admit. We joke about shipping fast and breaking things, but when you put a new economic model in front of a room full of engineers, they start thinking about long term incentives almost immediately.

Chocolate, JavaScript, and Big Questions

The open web is strange and unfinished. We inherited an internet optimized for ads because that is what scaled at the time. But that does not mean it is the final form. Standards evolve.

VanJS continues to be that space where ideas meet code, and where big questions about the future of the web get debated over chocolate and JavaScript.

That is my kind of Valentine’s story.

That's it from me! 👋🏻 Have any questions? feel free to join our Slack channel and DM me: SLACK LINK

Bibi
Community Manager @ Interledger Foundation 🌱
// here's an Easter Egg for those hunting 🥚

Midterm Report: Making IPS More Inclusive and Accessible to FinTechs and Non-Banks Assessment

Sarah Corley — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:32:15 +0000

Project Description
The Alliance of Digital Finance and FinTech Associations (AllianceDFA), in partnership with Contigo Global LLC, was awarded a grant from the Interledger Foundation (ILF) to lead a new global initiative aimed at making Instant Payment Systems (IPS) more inclusive and accessible to FinTechs, and Non-banks. The project‘s focus is to identify and document the challenges and successes that FinTechs and other Non-banks are experiencing in their markets, and will explore ways to strengthen the voice of inclusive finance actors in IPS governance, while identifying solutions to overcome the barriers that limit their integration and impact.

Project Update
The project aims to engage focus groups in 18 countries. To date, we have spoken with groups in six countries — Chile, Nepal, Nigeria, India, Ghana, and Kenya — with seven additional focus groups scheduled and five pending. To ensure holistic inclusion, we are intentionally targeting a mix of countries with established Instant Payment Systems (IPS) as well as those with emerging payment systems or markets still deciding which IPS to build or integrate. We are also prioritizing countries with unique market features to test whether the common barriers and enablers we have identified resonate across contexts, and to surface new insights from diverse environments. Across these discussions, stakeholders are sharing both challenges and successes related to the governance of existing payment infrastructure.

In addition, while we are on track in reaching our targeted number of countries in Asia and Africa, we are currently struggling getting traction in several Latin America and Caribbean markets. In LAC, we have confirmed interviews with Chile and the Caribbean, and possibly Peru and the Bahamas. However, despite several "pings" through Whatsapps and emails from AllianceDFA, we have not yet been able to get firm confirmations from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico or Uruguay, due to prior commitments and holidays.

We were mindful of not creating an experience where associations felt we were extracting contacts and insights without offering meaningful value in return. The associations involved in this work vary widely in their capacity, some operate with more than twenty staff and robust budgets, while others are volunteer‑run with annual resources of less than $1,000. Inviting their participation meant drawing on their time, networks, and knowledge, and it was important to us that the benefits flowed both ways.

A few of the most resource‑constrained associations asked whether a small financial contribution could be provided for their involvement. This did slow momentum in some markets as this was not possible within the current project budget. Fortunately, the inherent value of the research was recognised and we were able to identify alternative ways to ensure their contributions were acknowledged and value gained. We are also still exploring ideas with the Interledger Foundation team that create recognition of the value that associations shared.

We began by asking a simple question of our members: what would make participation in this research both feasible and genuinely valuable? The early conversations were candid. Members told us that response rates to research are often low and that anything demanding multiple meetings would struggle to land. They stressed that the process must not feel extractive; participation had to offer concrete benefits to their members and also for themselves as an association. This guidance shaped our design decisions.

Together with associations, we agreed on a single 90-minute session per market. We fused a short, anonymous survey with a facilitated discussion so that participants could identify priorities while also explaining the context behind them. Where a discussion ran long, or where someone could only join for 60 minutes, we followed up to complete the survey afterward, keeping our promise on time while protecting data quality.

To earn trust and ensure a positive response to the invitation and the focus group experience, we invested in how we invited people to participate. We sent personalised emails that framed the global significance of the work and explained why their market mattered. We shared the discussion topics in advance to reduce uncertainty and support an open, transparent dialogue. We also emphasised the Chatham House Rule and offered optional attribution as recognition of participants’ time and contribution. The invitation introduced all convening organisations (AllianceDFA, Contigo Global, the local association, and the Interledger Foundation) to demonstrate the credibility and legitimacy of the work. Co-branding with the local association signalled shared ownership and reinforced the standing of both the association and the research team.

Choosing to partner with AllianceDFA member associations added tangible value through their practical, context-specific guidance and deep local connections. Associations shared what typically works for their members, such as preferred meeting days, communication channels, and notice periods, and advised on the most appropriate way to manage invitations in their markets. Their networks were also instrumental in identifying the right participants to participate. We aligned our methodology with their recommendations, which has contributed directly to the success of the engagement so far.

We also deliberately gave associations choice in how they wished to be involved, recognising that they were leveraging their own reputations and relationships. In some markets, the association chose to take a leading role in sending invitations and convening, whilst others preferred this to be led by AllianceDFA with association endorsement. We adapted to each market’s preference while ensuring consistency in acknowledging and thanking associations as partners throughout the process.

At the start of each session, we ensured that everyone shared a common understanding of the focus of the research: formal Instant Payment Systems (IPS). To support this, we used a concise slide deck that defined what an IPS is and provided familiar examples (e.g. India’s UPI, Brazil’s PIX, Ghana’s GHIPPS, and Tanzania’s TIPPS) to anchor the discussion and its focus. Participants were invited to name their own IPS and comment on its level of maturity where one existed. These steps helped prevent misunderstandings and ensured that contributions were focused on the topic of IPS.

We introduced five broad categories of potential enablers and barriers using deliberately neutral language such as, “In some markets we have heard…” or “You may have…” to avoid implying that these factors necessarily applied to their context. The intention was to provide a starting point for the conversation without leading participants toward particular answers. We emphasised that they were not expected to comment on every category and should instead focus on what genuinely felt relevant or significant in their market. This approach allowed participants to surface their own priorities while ensuring the discussion remained unbiased and participant-led.

Our facilitation approach was designed to encourage contributions from every participant and to guide the group toward a collectively validated understanding of the market’s barriers and enablers. We kept video on and invited others to do so when bandwidth allowed, used the hand-raise feature to manage turn-taking and ensured no single participant dominated. The most productive moments were when people challenged and built on one another’s experiences; associations often validated whether a point matched what they heard across their membership, giving our findings breadth, depth and validity.

We have found that some associations we approach do not have the interest or capacity to host a session. In these cases, we are pivoting to using our own personal connections and networks, and those of the Interledger Foundation, to convene a group of relevant stakeholders directly and asking them to invite a small number of peers. This approach allows us to include these markets and capture their perspectives; however, we recognise that association-led sessions typically yield a more diverse and representative group, which in turn supports the surfacing of a wider range of voices and insights.

Project Impact & Target Audience(s)
We have included markets within our work that are interesting yet are not often researched or written about in research relating to IPS and/or fintech. Within these focus groups, we have also prioritised hearing from the smaller fintechs, non-banks and start-ups. The voices of these entities are often under-represented in both a local and global stage, yet are at times even more impacted by national payment infrastructure and policy decisions. They also are the actors in the digital finance ecosystem which are most likely currently serving or aspiring to serve marginalised consumers, such as women, rural dwellers and micro/small entrepreneurs. They often have a greater insight into the needs of these consumers and can also bring important perspectives on their needs and the impact of decisions on the ability to serve these consumers.

The value proposition for participants is: sharing their experiences in a global study, contributing to cross-market learning, and gaining insights from other jurisdictions once the results are shared. For associations, the work provided several benefits: new insights that could inform their strategic planning and strengthen their in-country advocacy with central banks or IPS operators; visibility through co-branding; and an activity they could report back to their members as part of their annual programming. Participants and associations expressed eagerness to read the report.

What is emerging as being important to associations and participants, is the request to share back what we are learning through the process. The final assessment, alongside a series of complimentary webinars and knowledge products, will equip participants and associations with insights on the common challenges and ideas for best practices. Associations can use the information to strengthen their own advocacy strategies and programming. Several associations have also expressed desire to participate in cross‑country learning, envisioning a space where associations can collectively explore best practices and collaborate on shared advocacy priorities. This interest underscores the potential for the project not only to gather knowledge but to catalyse networks of peer learning that support collective and local action.

Progress on Objectives
We have 3 Key Deliverables:
1 - Supporting membership deepening within AllianceDFA, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. Update & Progress: Deliverable met with the onboarding of FinteChile. In addition, Fintech Armenia and PSP Association Nepal have been onboarded, bringing total membership to 42. Chile and Nepal are participating in the IPS research. Discussions are ongoing in other LAC countries as well as with a new association currently in formation in the region.

2 - Produce a published Assessment on the Deeper Needs & Challenges of FinTechs in Integrating into their local IPS. Update & Progress: We are concentrating our energies on scheduling and implementing focus groups. We aim to be finished with focus groups by mid-February, and will move into writing the report ready for publishing in March.

3 - Internal Assessment: An Internal Set of Recommendations to Interledger Foundation on What Deeper Solutions Could Serve the Global FinTech Ecosystem to Increase Inclusive Governance. Update & Progress: Our internal assessment relies on feedback from focus groups, and we will work on clarifying and refining these recommendations once the focus groups have been concluded in mid-February. Based on the first 5 focus groups completed, the original set of potential deeper solutions has merit. However, we are seeking more data to understand how these solutions address the common challenges we are hearing. We are including a quantitative survey within our focus group discussions to help us analyze these potential solutions and their utility more closely.

Communications and Marketing
AllianceDFA has published the approved press release on their website and has included the language in their messages to member Associations. Other than the approved press release, we have not yet published any social media. We are concentrating on scheduling and having focus groups.

What’s Next
We remain optimistic that we will complete our interviews and deliverables by March 13.

Community Support
If any ILF community members have good connections with the FinTech associations in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia or Uruguay, please reach out to Sarah Corley: sarah@alliancedfa.org