The Interledger Community 🌱: Ayden Férdeline

Key Themes from the Interledger Summit 2025 Listening Lab

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:34:52 +0000

At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City on November 5-6, eight Listening Lab sessions converged around four critical themes that challenge conventional approaches to digital financial inclusion. The subject matter experts and practitioners present argued that achieving genuine financial equity requires rethinking our fundamental assumptions about technology, power, and community agency.

Theme 1: Technology as Political Architecture

Two sessions explored how digital financial systems encode political decisions that shape economic participation globally. “Human Rights by Design: Financial Infrastructure that Works for Everyone” introduced the concept of “algorithmic intensification,” arguing that digitization amplifies existing inequalities unless deliberately designed otherwise. Panelists showed how payment systems embed choices about who can participate, what behavior appears suspicious, and whose money flows freely. These decisions, coded in one country, immediately affect people elsewhere.

“Trustworthy by Default: Designing Digital Finance People Choose to Use” grounded these concerns in Mexican reality. Despite 400 regulated financial institutions and three decades of instant payments, consumer trust remains fragile. Nearly half of all complaints stem from unrecognized transactions, while opacity breeds confusion even among sophisticated users. Together, these sessions established that building trust requires transparency, proximity, and user control.

Theme 2: Reimagining Capital and Support Systems

The next cluster examined how funding and support structures must evolve. “Rights and Rails: How Philanthropy Links Access, Capacity & Inclusive Payment Systems” challenged philanthropic institutions to provide patient capital and wraparound services rather than chasing scale. Panelists stated that Silicon Valley wastes billions on solutions built without community input, while philanthropy too often dismisses community alternatives as “unviable.” They advocated measuring dignity and trust rather than user counts.

“From Mission to Market: Where Fintech and CDFIs Align and Clash” explored the tension between speed and relationship building in lending. While fintechs fund loans in nine days versus CDFIs’ typical turnaround time of 14 days, those extra five days represent trust building that is essential for generational wealth creation. With $84 trillion in wealth about to transfer between generations in the U.S., the panel warned that young people entering markets through mobile money apps lack the financial literacy that personal relationships traditionally provided. Both sessions argued for supporting community-controlled alternatives rather than extending corporate services.

Theme 3: Regional Insights with Global Implications

Three regional panels revealed how Latin America serves as both a cautionary tale and innovation laboratory. “Unlocking Financial Interoperability in Latin America” showed that technical infrastructure means little without aligned incentives. Mexico has superior payment rails to Colombia but worse inclusion because stakeholders view each other as competitors rather than collaborating against cash, which still dominates 85% of transactions.

“From Access to Wellbeing: Designing Financial Tools Women Can Trust and Use” confronted the widening gender gap in financial inclusion across Latin America. Even highly educated women choose less profitable investments due to mistrust, while products designed for formal sector workers ignore women juggling caregiving with informal employment. The panel called for recognizing and strengthening existing practices like rotating savings groups rather than displacing them.

“From Policy to Practice: Financial Inclusion in Mexico” showcased radical experiments in community ownership. Indigenous telecommunications cooperatives break extraction cycles by keeping resources local, while community investment platforms enable neighbors to fund local businesses. These models demonstrate that communities can build and operate their own infrastructure rather than waiting for corporate or government provision.

Theme 4: Cultivating New Talent

“From Classroom to Codebase: How Universities Cultivate the Next Generation of Open Payments Talent” offered hope through educational innovation. Programs funded by the Interledger Foundation at Bowie State University, University of Cape Town, and The Hague University of Applied Sciences show that students from historically excluded communities bring essential insights. Their lived experience of financial exclusion, when channeled through appropriate curriculum, produces solutions that surprise seasoned practitioners. The session emphasized that preparing ethical technologists requires understanding community needs, not just mastering code.

The Path Forward

Across all eight sessions, practitioners delivered a consistent message: financial inclusion fails when systems are extended to communities rather than owned by them. The discussions surfaced that every technical choice embeds values, that trust must be earned through transparency and proximity, and that meaningful inclusion requires patient capital, inclusive governance, and recognition that communities already possess sophisticated financial practices. These insights matter urgently. As financial infrastructure increasingly mediates economic life globally, the design choices made today determine not just who can access services, but who controls the architecture of economic participation itself.

Listening Lab Lessons | Rights and Rails: How Philanthropy Links Access, Capacity & Inclusive Payment Systems

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:13:33 +0000

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the closing session of the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City moderated by the Interledger Foundation’s Chris Lawrence, three leaders in public interest technology challenged philanthropic institutions to fundamentally reimagine how they fund equitable financial systems: not just with capital, but with patience, accountability, and community trust.

The Data Dilemma

Amy Sample Ward, CEO of NTEN, a global organization supporting equitable technology use in social impact work, opened with an observation that had haunted them throughout the Summit: nearly every conversation about Open Payments overlooked the critical question of data. “What’s going to happen to my data?” they asked rhetorically, saying it is the first question that arises in digital literacy classes serving communities without reliable internet access.

The fear is rational and well-founded. For formerly incarcerated individuals, creating an online profile feels like wearing a permanent banner advertising their past. For immigrants sending remittances, each transaction raises anxiety: “What am I inadvertently doing to make more vulnerable the person I'm sending money to?”

“There’s so much fear wrapped up in data,” Sample Ward emphasized. “What data is ours? How do we control it? How do we see it? How do we move it? And how do we protect it?”

Afua Bruce, who leads the advisory firm ANB Advisory Group, reframed the issue starkly: “Caring about people in this era is caring about their data.” She described how financial inclusion technologies increasingly rely on algorithmic rating systems to determine creditworthiness. The critical questions become: What data feeds these algorithms? Who builds them? To whom are they accountable? What biases are embedded, and what checks exist to preserve human dignity?

The Labor Market Laboratory

Wilneida Negrón, who works at the intersection of private capital, philanthropy, and future-of-work issues, provided insights from examining hundreds of fintech products entering labor markets. While some workers appreciate earned wage access apps that address immediate cash flow needs, digital forensics reveals a troubling pattern: hidden fees, third-party data sales to insurance companies, and vendor agreements that lock workers into platforms with minimal transparency.

“Workers are just seeing the usefulness,” Negrón explained. “But when you look at the bones — because these products aren’t coming from open source and public interest fields — they actually create new risks.” Workers get locked out of platforms without explanation, penalized without recourse, and trapped by information asymmetries that exist between themselves and the fintech intermediaries now mediating labor relations.

The problem extends beyond individual apps to entire economic structures. As traditional W-2 employment declines and gig work expands, worker cooperatives are attempting to build alternative platforms for house cleaning, driving, and other services. Yet philanthropy consistently fails to fund these alternatives. “I go to philanthropy all the time,” Negrón reported, “and they don’t have a strategy for that. These worker co-ops don’t seem viable or can't scale, which is really problematic for philanthropy to be speaking like that.”

Decentering Extraction

Sample Ward proposed a radical reorientation: decenter capitalism, surveillance, militarism, and colonialism from technology investment. “I would love to say eliminate, but I’ll just say decenter,” they offered. What replaces these priorities? Three principles: sovereignty, freedom, and safety.

“The internet, any individual tool, any technological system should honor my sovereignty, my freedom and my safety,” Sample Ward argued. Evaluated through this lens, very few existing technologies pass muster. The goal isn’t perfection but prioritization: compete on trustworthiness, prove safety, eliminate borders that separate people from their own money.

“Every border belies the violence of its maintenance,” Sample Ward told the audience, quoting Ayesha Siddiqi, invoking borders not just geographic but financial. “Those charts we’ve seen across the stage? Those are borders. There is violence in the maintenance of those separations.”

From Ideas to Infrastructure

Bruce identified a critical gap in philanthropic strategy: the journey from idea to sustainable business. “Funders could really help with derisking the space,” she explained, “creating the time and giving founders the time and space to actually have conversations with community members, with workers, to say what are your actual needs?”

She described grantees needing comprehensive support beyond funding: business consultants, market testing, convening power to bring together cross-industry expertise, marketing assistance. “How do we take ideas from hackathons and provide wrap-around services, not just funding, to create sustainable organizations?”

Sample Ward built on this critique by challenging the accelerator model itself: “We don’t need funders making more accelerators: idea to Minimum Viable Product in six weeks. Ideas are everywhere. We need funders saying, ‘You’ve tried this five times. You’re so much closer than try one. We’re going to fund you all the way to version eight.’” They pointed to the previous day’s documentary about the People’s Clearinghouse as an example: “It wasn’t ‘look how fast we did this,’ it was deep community building that takes time and space and learning.”

Lessons from Silicon Valley's Failures

Negrón offered insights from Silicon Valley, not as a model to emulate wholesale, but as a cautionary tale with instructive mechanics. Y Combinator, the powerhouse accelerator behind Airbnb and other major companies, provides seed funding as well as access to investor networks, future co-founders, and a closed ecosystem of support. “We do not have that on the public interest side,” she noted. “There is no Y Combinator for people building open source tools.”

More tellingly, she described the $30 billion annual investment in AI agents – chatbots meant to revolutionize work that are instead producing what critics call “AI slop.” The failure stems from insularity: founders didn’t spend time talking to unions, workers, or embracing the complexity of labor markets and social issues. “Even with billion-dollar investments, their products are not that useful,” she observed. An OpenAI co-founder recently admitted that functional AI agents remain ten years away.

The lesson for philanthropy? “Founders in those spaces want to build properly. They want to build responsibly. But there’s pressure to grow.” Philanthropic institutions have unique advantages: they can activate multiple capital types (program-related investments, grants, mission-related investments, recoverable grants, revenue sharing agreements) not merely to build technology but to address contextual issues that make technology actually useful.

Measuring What Matters

When Lawrence asked for advice specific to the Interledger Foundation, Bruce challenged the sector’s default metrics: “Users does not equal usefulness.” She advocated measuring trust, dignity, and true access to resources rather than user counts or transaction volumes.

Sample Ward refined this further: “Trust isn’t necessarily what I would recommend as the metric because it’s the precursor to allow any other metrics to happen. Without trust, we’re not here, but trust doesn’t need to be the thing we measure.” Instead, they advocate measuring confidence and skills development: outcomes only possible when trust exists but that also indicate actual adoption and impact.

They also urged funding “the full conditions under which financial tools are being used: building up commerce in that village, funding digital access and broadband, funding holistically around the conditions that exist.” This approach creates space for unexpected, emergent innovations.

Negrón’s closing advice cut to the core: “Pursue the mission, not the strategy.” In the United States, regulatory frameworks lag 15 years behind technological innovation. “We’re already making another big leap,” she warned. “Technology is already getting ahead of mission and people and democracy and human values. We need to invest as much time and resources on the mission, on the people, on the broader context, so that has an opportunity to not get eaten alive by technology that moves a lot faster.”

Bruce challenged the notion of “unintended consequences” that haunts technology discourse: “The unintended consequences are the same every time with every iteration of technology, we forgot to think about the edge cases, Black and brown people, women, people who were differently abled. We just didn’t consider them. And now there are desperate impacts every single time.” These “aren’t unintended, they’re predictable results” of excluding marginalized voices from design processes.

Building Alternatives

The session concluded with practical recommendations beyond funding strategies. Panelists highlighted indigenous-led efforts, particularly Maori communities in New Zealand, reclaiming data through trusts and ownership structures. Others described litigators seeking philanthropic investment in strategic legal funds for class-action lawsuits addressing data harms to workers, consumers, and children. Most urgently, panelists called for funding locally owned, locally controlled, interoperable open source alternatives to extractive platforms. “There could be an ecosystem of people building these alternatives,” Negrón noted. “Creating a fund to support them, along with the sticks of class action lawsuits and litigation, would be valuable.”

The panel’s final message was that philanthropy must move beyond treating technology as neutral infrastructure requiring only capital investment. Building genuinely inclusive payment systems demands patient capital, holistic community investment, accountability mechanisms, and centering sovereignty, freedom, and safety. Anything less perpetuates the violence embedded in existing financial borders, and betrays the communities these systems claim to serve.

Listening Lab Lessons | From Classroom to Codebase: How Universities Cultivate the Next Generation of Open Payments Talent

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:09:48 +0000

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, three educators from three continents gathered to discuss an urgent question: How do we prepare students to build payment systems that actually serve historically excluded communities? The panel, “From Classroom to Codebase: How Universities Cultivate the Next Generation of Open Payments Talent,” moderated by Interledger ambassador Smriti Parsheera, revealed that the answer lies not just in technical training, but in fundamentally rethinking how universities approach financial technology education.

On stage were three academics who are already doing that work: Andrew Mangle (Bowie State University, USA), Allan Davids (University of Cape Town, South Africa), and Aleksandra Asscheman (The Hague University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands).

Building Diversity Through Higher Education

The Interledger Foundation has strategically invested in universities specifically chosen for their commitment to serving underrepresented communities.

Bowie State University, Maryland’s oldest historically Black college and university (HBCU), has created over 700 touchpoints for student engagement with Open Payments through courses, guest speakers, and Interledger Summit participation over nearly four years of partnership. Mangle emphasized that HBCUs bring particular value to fintech education because students arrive with “deep personal insight of financial inclusion and not being part of the process”; lived experience that becomes pedagogically powerful when channeled into curriculum design.

Rather than beginning with technical specifications, Bowie State leads with empathy and awareness, teaching students to understand the underbanked by studying cross-border payments and interviewing financially excluded individuals. This approach creates entry points for students across all majors to see themselves as potential contributors to solving global financial access challenges.

The University of Cape Town’s MPhil in Financial Technology, which launched in 2018 with Interledger Foundation support, similarly prioritizes diversity: for the 2026 cohort, 70 percent of students will come from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, and 52 percent will be women, despite women comprising only 38 percent of applicants. These diversity targets reflect proactive efforts to ensure that fintech innovations are built by people who understand the communities these systems will serve.

Pedagogical Innovation and Real-World Engagement

All three institutions have embraced experiential learning models that move beyond classroom theory to immersive practice. Bowie State brings students directly to the Interledger Summit itself, where they experience firsthand that “ChatGPT doesn’t have all your answers” about Open Payments development. This immersion transforms abstract concepts into lived reality and signals to students that they belong in professional spaces.

The University of Cape Town has made annual hackathons central to its approach. When organizers asked participants at the most recent event how many were experiencing their first hackathon, every hand went up, revealing that even Master’s-level fintech students had not previously participated. The quality of solutions emerging from these intensive five-day learning events, where students arrive Monday knowing nothing about Open Payments and compete Saturday, has consistently impressed experienced practitioners, suggesting that appropriate support and high expectations unlock student potential.

The Hague University of Applied Sciences takes an interdisciplinary approach by pairing law and finance students, addressing a critical market gap: professionals who understand both what developers are building and how regulatory frameworks must evolve. Students begin with workshops on the Interledger Protocol and Open Payments, but crucially, they learn through real stories and use cases rather than abstract regulatory texts. The curriculum culminates in student-driven projects where legal and finance students explore problems of their choosing, with faculty coaching rather than directing.

Confronting Artificial Intelligence in Education

The panel addressed an urgent challenge for contemporary universities: how to teach effectively when AI tools like ChatGPT cannot keep pace with rapidly evolving fields. Mangle noted that generative AI has “not kept pace with the movement of Open Payments and open systems,” making AI-generated information about the Interledger Protocol frequently outdated. This limitation becomes a teaching tool: when students discover that ChatGPT lacks answers, they must engage with primary sources, attend convenings, and participate in communities of practice.

The University of Cape Town recently implemented an AI teaching policy that works with, rather than against, these tools, by banning AI detectors and rethinking assessment entirely. Oral exams have reemerged as verification that students understand material deeply rather than simply receiving AI-generated submissions.

The Hague University of Applied Sciences takes a more integrated approach, teaching students to use ChatGPT as a starting point, then critically evaluate and iterate their queries. Asscheman observed that students anxious about AI replacing their careers experience relief when the curriculum itself demonstrates AI’s current limitations: “if you have the skill to correctly interact with it, then don’t worry, your job is not going to be replaced by AI.”

Building Systems, Not Programs

A recurring theme was the need to move from episodic engagement to systemic support. Mangle emphasized the goal of “transition from episodic engagement to now systems that support curriculum continuous engagement.” However, this systemization faces headwinds. Davids noted that universities globally face “a bit of a precarious position,” with funding that has “generally flat lined globally” while student intake increases. Even well-funded opportunities may go unapplied simply because institutions lack human resources to implement new programs.

This constraint makes collaboration essential. Each institution that develops curriculum, assessment rubrics, or pedagogical solutions creates resources that could benefit the network, if effectively shared. The Hague University of Applied Sciences plans to connect with practitioners to bring “people passionate about all the topics” into classrooms, recognizing that faculty cannot be experts in every dimension of rapidly evolving fields. Davids articulated a vision for the next phase: creating a “fully-fledged onboarding kit” that leverages collective experience to lower barriers for new institutions.

The University as Connective Tissue

Davids offered an expansive vision for universities’ unique role. Universities are “the connective tissue between industry, between research, and between policy,” operating with relative independence from commercial pressures while maintaining public trust. However, fulfilling this role requires universities to overcome siloed structures that “don’t allow any flexibility” and prepare students for inherently interdisciplinary fields like fintech. Partnerships prove essential: Interledger Foundation funding provides access to technologies and practitioners; regulators could create university sandboxes where students build and test solutions; industry can offer internships and pathways to employment.

Toward Open Access and Shared Resources

Mangle challenged the assumption that higher education institutions must serve as knowledge gatekeepers. Learning resources “should be open and accessible to everyone” and not restricted to enrolled students. The Hague University of Applied Sciences has already implemented this through its blockchain minor, where the lecture materials are published open access for anyone interested. This approach recognizes that passion and aptitude for Open Payments may exist far beyond formal degree programs.

Asscheman articulated another critical shift: moving Open Payments perception from niche specialization to fundamental literacy necessary for future careers in finance or banking. This requires concrete, relatable examples rather than abstract concepts, and the kind of real stories that make financial inclusion stakes tangible.

The work of preparing the next generation of Open Payments professionals fundamentally rests on human commitment. For Mangle, it means “building relationships with students, being accessible to students, trying to empathize with students” to help them “live their best lives.” For Asscheman, it means finding colleagues equally passionate about “doing something that really is going to make the eyes of our students lighten.” Beneath systems-building and curriculum development lies the work of seeing potential in students and investing in relationships that transform lives.

Listening Lab Lessons | From Mission to Market: Where Fintech and CDFIs Align and Clash

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:06:22 +0000

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the panel “From Mission to Market: Where Fintech and CDFIs Align and Clash” confronted an urgent paradox in American finance. While 70% of U.S. banks have vanished since 1984, leaving entire communities without traditional financial services, a digital bank and financial technology company called Chime has become the nation's sixth-largest debit card issuer without a single branch. Moderated by Casey Ariel Dike’, the discussion brought together leaders straddling these divergent worlds: Shaundra Jacobs, Texas Market President for CDFI Allcap; Sheena Allen, Interledger ambassador; and Feintz Pierre, VP of Business Development at Lendistry, which operates as both a fintech and a CDFI. Their conversation touched on how fintechs and CDFIs can best serve each other and communities before an unprecedented $84 trillion wealth transfer leaves the traditional banking system entirely.

The Great Wealth Migration Nobody’s Preparing For

Allen laid out the stakes: “You have about 10 trillion, maybe more, of people who are usually baby boomers or up. That’s where their wealth is,” she explained. This wealth, accumulated through 401(k)s, land, and investments, will soon pass to younger generations who have never experienced traditional banking relationships.

The implications are staggering. When Meta recently bought 400 acres in Louisiana for a data center, it likely paid billions to someone’s “great granddad.” But as Allen pointed out, “What’s going to happen when the granddad’s gone and now the grandson or the son has to have it? It’s the first time the son’s gonna be like, what the heck am I gonna do with $2 billion?”

This wealth transfer represents both crisis and opportunity. The crisis: younger generations don’t want bank branches or relationships; 49% of Black investors and 45% of Hispanic investors between the ages of 18 and 34 enter the markets through mobile apps like Robinhood, not investment advisors. The opportunity: whoever bridges the trust of CDFIs with the technology of fintech could capture this massive wealth migration.

Speed Versus Trust: The Fundamental Tension

The panel crystallized the core friction between fintech and CDFIs into stark operational differences. When asked about best-case funding scenarios with perfect documentation, Jacobs reported her fastest CDFI loan took 14 days. Pierre’s fintech platform, leveraging AI and automated verification, could fund a $100,000 loan in nine days.

But these five days represent more than process efficiency; they embody fundamentally different philosophies. “Fintech for the most part, we are very much a ‘we’re going to do it now and ask for permission later,’” Allen explained. “Whereas when you are a CDFI and you are so into the system of the regulatory way, you’re very much like, ‘no, I’m going to ask for permission and then see if I can or cannot do it.’”

This clash extends beyond regulatory appetite to institutional longevity. CDFIs worry about fintech partners disappearing when venture capital dries up. “The CDFIs are like, I don't want to put too much trust and too much time in this relationship and then two months from now, two years from now, I got to start all the way back over somewhere else because you shut down,” Allen observed.

Yet the trust CDFIs provide through “handholding” and technical assistance, which Jacobs calls moving from "ideation stage" through business planning to banking relationships, takes time that entrepreneurs often don’t have. “A lot of times people are already working out of desperation,” Jacobs noted. “They needed the money yesterday.”

The Hidden Strengths of Patient Capital

Lendistry’s dual identity as both fintech and CDFI offers unique insights into each model’s strengths. Pierre emphasized that being a CDFI isn’t just about serving specific underserved markets, but also about delivering financial literacy as a core offering. “After you educate and help these small business owners understand their business model, you take them through the growth cycle and then you start to give them those resources.”

This educational component proves essential because, as Pierre noted, “the data doesn’t always tell the story.” An entrepreneur paying daycare from their business account might look financially undisciplined to an algorithm but could be making rational decisions within their complex reality. “If I missed a payment on something, it could be because my babysitter needed money early or I had to help a family member out,” he explained.

Jacobs reinforced this with her concept of “delay not denial”, which is the CDFI approach of coaching clients toward readiness rather than simply rejecting them. Starting with loans as small as $5,000, CDFIs build entrepreneurs toward “that six-figure ask or that million dollars,” creating generational wealth pathways that quick transactions can’t provide.

The results validate this patience. Bank of America revealed at a recent CDFI conference that over 25 years, they’ve lost only six basis points (less than a tenth of a percent) on their CDFI portfolio. The trust and social capital CDFIs build translates directly into repayment rates that outperform traditional lending.

Technology Without Trust Is Just Faster Rejection

While CDFIs have trust, they desperately lack technology. “My local credit union still doesn’t have a mobile app,” Allen shared, adding with frustration, “I will build you one, please, like let me help you out.” This technology gap becomes critical as younger generations expect digital-first experiences.

The panel agreed that AI and automation show promise for improving backend processes, but warned against removing human elements from customer relationships. “The trust factor usually came from human relationships,” Allen emphasized. “My dad wants to talk to the teller, my dad wants to touch his money.”

Pierre added context about AI’s limitations in serving marginalized communities: “The problem particularly for those in underserved areas, they don’t have the data actually to make the AI work properly.” When financial AI models train primarily on data from major banks serving affluent communities, their outputs become “horrible” for someone in rural Mississippi where those banks don’t exist.

The panel did highlight one success: during the Paycheck Protection Program, 50% of loans to Black businesses came from online banks with no branches, because automated underwriting removed subjective bias that might have excluded these borrowers from traditional channels.

The Banking Extinction Event

When asked whether traditional banks would survive the next 10 to 20 years, the panel offered varying predictions. Allen believes banks will persist by acquiring successful fintechs — “they have enough money to just keep acquiring” — and expressed concern for community institutions: “I’m scared that credit unions will disappear... the same way we have seen Black banks and Minority Depository Institutions start to disappear.”

Dike’ invoked Bill Gates’ 1994 observation that “banking is necessary, banks are not.” She predicted that non-financial companies would unseat traditional banks for marginalized communities, citing Kenya’s Safaricom, whose mobile money network now processes 60% of the country’s GDP outside the banking system. With AWS already developing “agentic models” for AI-to-AI financial transactions, the disruption might come from technology companies rather than financial institutions.

Building New, Rather Than Fixing Broken

The panel’s closing advice for next-generation leaders was unanimous: stop trying to fix a broken system. “We keep trying to just make adjustments to a system that’s already broken,” Allen argued. “Because fintech can move fast, because CDFIs are way more in tune with the community, we have a much better opportunity to just build something new.”

Jacobs added an emotional dimension often missing from financial innovation discussions: “When it comes to my money, I have a lot of feelings about that... I am trying to really do generational wealth for my family and my livelihood.” This human element — feelings about money, dreams of generational wealth, the need to be seen as more than a number — must inform any successful collaboration.

Dike’ concluded with a challenge to recognize “when marginalization is a feature of the system and not a failure of it and decide what you’re going to do about it.”

Listening Lab Lessons | Trustworthy by Default: Designing Digital Finance People Choose to Use

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:02:59 +0000

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the Interledger Summit 2025, the panel “Trustworthy by Default: Designing Digital Finance People Choose to Use” confronted a stark paradox in Mexican financial services. Despite having 400 regulated financial institutions, including 50 banks, 40 SOFIPOs (small banks serving specific communities), and 60 regulated fintechs, trust in digital finance remains alarmingly fragile. Moderated by Sarah Corley, CEO of the Alliance of Digital Finance and Fintech Associations, the discussion brought together Alejandro Maldonado Viveros, CEO of Fintechland; Fiorentina García Miramón, Executive Director of Tec-Check; and Alejandra Cullen Benítez, partner at FinSocial. Their conversation revealed that Mexico’s financial inclusion challenge is primarily about designing services worthy of users’ trust from the start, and not one primarily of technology or access.

The Trust Crisis by the Numbers

García Miramón opened with sobering statistics from Tec-Check’s analysis of over 300,000 consumer complaints filed with CONDUSEF, Mexico’s financial consumer protection agency. The findings paint a picture of systemic trust failure: nearly half of all complaints stem from unrecognized transactions, rising to 75% for traditional banks. Only five out of 100 complaints are resolved in consumers’ favor, dropping to three in southern Mexico, revealing how inequality compounds distrust.

“Are we really that careless? Or is someone else shopping with our data?” García Miramón asked the audience. When she requested a show of hands from those who had dealt with unrecognized transactions, nearly everyone raised their hand, a visceral demonstration of how widespread the problem has become.

The complexity of the system itself breeds confusion and mistrust. Mexico’s central bank has approved over 16,000 different commission types that banks can charge consumers. “Sometimes we cannot even follow our own transactions in banking apps,” García Miramón observed, highlighting how opacity erodes confidence even among sophisticated users.

Beyond Mexico City: The Real Financial Exclusion

Maldonado Viveros provided crucial context about Mexico’s dual financial reality. While Mexico City residents see bank branches and ATMs everywhere, the picture changes dramatically outside the capital. In rural communities with fewer than 15,000 people, especially those where people speak indigenous languages, only 2.5 bank branches exist per community on average.

The statistics reveal deep structural exclusion: 37% of Mexicans save through informal products like keeping cash “under the mattress” (banco de colchón), while another 35% don’t save at all. Nine out of ten transactions remain cash-based, despite decades of digital payment infrastructure development.

“We have [had] instant payments since 30 years ago with SPEI,” Maldonado Viveros noted, referring to Mexico’s interbank instant payment system. “The problem is that we don’t have a digital payment experience that you can [use] … without a bank account.”

Fear of fraud, informal employment, limited digital literacy, and historical distrust of formal institutions all contribute to persistent cash dominance. As Maldonado Viveros emphasized, “If we want to design good digital financial products, we have to understand how Mexicans work, how they do finance, how they actually have contact with financial institutions.”

Trust as Risk Management

Cullen Benítez reframed the trust conversation in business terms that resonated throughout the discussion. “This is not about ethics versus profits or about long-term growth versus short-term extraction,” she argued. “It’s about sustainability versus volatility.”

She identified three ways trust directly impacts business fundamentals. First, customer acquisition costs drop when trust exists because “word of mouth is still and remains the most powerful growth engine for the financial sector.” Second, portfolio quality improves when clients trust providers, leading to better loan repayment and deeper relationships. Third, regulatory risk decreases because fewer complaints about hidden fees or surprises mean softer supervision and lower compliance costs.

FinSocial’s experience serving low-income savers and borrowers has demonstrated that “the best trust building tools are clarity and proximity.” Simple interfaces showing exactly what users will pay or receive, loan simulations explaining impact in pesos rather than percentages, and real-time transaction confirmations all reduce what Cullen Benítez calls “the anxiety of the user, which is the most important enemy of inclusion.”

Her prescription was direct: institutionalize transparency as governance rather than marketing, give users control over their data as empowerment not just compliance, and align incentives with client wellbeing rather than transaction volume.

Innovation Without Trust Is Innovation Without Users

The panel grappled with how to balance innovation with trustworthiness. “In the financial sector, innovating feels like changing the engine mid-flight,” Cullen Benítez observed. “You know that you cannot crash. You can’t afford to crash, but you still need to make the change.”

When innovations fail, like apps that disappear, data leaks, or product misfires, the damage extends beyond individual companies to undermine trust in the entire digital financial ecosystem. The solution isn’t slowing innovation but building what Cullen Benítez calls “guardrails strong enough to let us move faster without falling off the cliff.”

She outlined three principles for responsible innovation. First, design with clarity: “If your user can’t understand your product in one screen, then it’s not ready. Complexity kills trust.” Second, share responsibility early by bringing regulators, clients, and partners into pilots before problems arise. Third, build resilience rather than hype, scaling what works even if it takes longer. “In finance, durability beats speed every time. It’s not about being the first, but being the best.”

The Missing Voice: Consumer Organizations

García Miramón asked the audience how often financial institutions collaborate with consumer organizations. There was silence in the room. “Industry is not talking to consumer organizations,” she stated bluntly, before asking audience members if they belonged to any consumer organization representing their interests. Again, silence.
This disconnect becomes particularly problematic as Mexico moves toward open banking and interoperability. “Right now, the industry is building the highways to move our data and money faster,” García Miramón warned, “but we are not seeing the building of emergency lanes when something crashes.”

Her call for alignment was specific: give consumer organizations space in forums like the Interledger Summit, create advisory councils that include consumer voices, and build evidence and insights together through joint research projects. “We as consumers like to move toward interoperability,” she emphasized, “but we need to make sure that it’s not just about connecting our accounts, but also about connecting our rights.”

Technology as Enabler, Not Solution

While Mexico has sophisticated payment infrastructure like SPEI for instant payments, CoDi for QR payments, and DiMo for mobile payments, adoption remains limited. Maldonado Viveros explained that user experience, not technology, is the barrier. CoDi requires opening multiple apps and showing QR codes in complex sequences. DiMo enables phone-to-phone payments but requires a bank account first.

“The user experience should be easy,” he stressed. Success requires regulators mandating adoption rather than leaving it optional, and creating pathways for merchants to receive payments without bank accounts. “The payment should be the pivot and the first point to then make financial inclusion.”

His experience developing AforeMóvil, a single app connecting all of Mexico's pension funds, demonstrates what is possible when regulators prioritize user needs. The app, now used by 20 million Mexicans, solved a fundamental problem: people didn’t know which of ten pension funds held their money. By creating one interface for all funds, the regulator made the complex simple.

Measuring What Matters

Cullen Benítez proposed a framework for measuring trust. “Trust sounds like air, but it’s not. It’s measurable and it leaves a trail,” she explained.

Behavioral signals provide the most honest metrics: retention, repayment, and referrals show whether clients want to stay. Reliability and transparency metrics include uptime, payment success rates, and complaint types, with a crucial distinction between technical failures (forgivable) and surprise fees (trust-breaking). Sentiment measurement through direct questions about comfort leaving money and data with the platform completes the picture.

“You make a dashboard that you have to follow as much as your balance sheet,” Cullen Benítez advised. But measurement alone isn’t enough: “If you pay your people an extra bonus for following trust indicators, then it’s definitely going to be done.”

From Slogan to Policy

The panel concluded with a vision for Mexico’s financial future that García Miramón articulated through three scenarios: seeing hardly anyone in line at bank branches because digital services work seamlessly; far fewer complaints about strange transactions because systems are transparent and secure with proactive reparation when banks make mistakes; and consumers able to switch providers with two clicks when trust is broken.

Cullen Benítez’s closing call was for trust to “stop being a slogan [and] to become a policy” not just within organizations but at the regulatory level, making trust by design a regional imperative.

Maldonado Viveros offered a generational perspective, noting that young Mexicans who grew up digital trust fintechs over traditional banks. “They don't go to BBVA or Santander, they have Nubank... they are born in a digital era.”

Yet waiting for generational change isn’t enough. As the panel made clear, building trustworthy digital finance requires deliberate design choices today: simplicity over complexity, transparency over opacity, consumer voice over institutional assumption, and measuring trust as rigorously as profit. The technology already exists. The regulations are evolving. What is needed now is the will to design financial services that don’t just digitize existing systems but fundamentally reimagine them with trust at their core.

Listening Lab Lessons | Unlocking Financial Interoperability in Latin America

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:58:30 +0000

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the panel “Unlocking Financial Interoperability in Latin America” tackled a deceptively simple question: Why can’t money move as easily as an email? Moderated by Beatriz Durán Serrano of Open Finance Tribe Mexico, the discussion brought together payment infrastructure innovators from across the region: Andrés Albán, founder and CEO of Colombian fintech Punto Red; Alejandra Olivares from Mexico’s National Banking and Securities Commission; Jordi Puig, Innovation and Programs Director of Finnosummit; and Íñigo Rumayor, founder of Mexican payment company Monato.

Their conversation revealed that while Latin America has all the technological pieces needed for seamless financial interoperability, the real barriers are structural: misaligned incentives, fragmented governance, and a failure to collaborate against the true competitor — cash.

The Colombian Miracle and Mexican Reality

Albán opened with Colombia’s remarkable transformation: in just eight years, the country moved from 50% to 75% financial inclusion. The catalyst was digitizing government subsidy payments to female heads of household, but success required solving three fundamental problems that still plague Mexico and other Latin American markets.

“When people were going to receive the subsidy, they had to go to a near[by] village, received $50 of subsidy and it cost them $15 to claim the subsidy on commuting costs and time wasted,” Albán explained. The solution addressed cost, trust, and usability simultaneously. Colombia created free access networks, ensuring money availability, and simplifying transactions.

Mexico faces similar challenges but with distinct complications. As Albán noted, “To deposit or pay a public service can cost $1 per transaction” in Mexico, which is a prohibitive barrier for low-income users. With only three banking agents per 10,000 adults in many areas and vast parts of the country without bank branches, the infrastructure gaps compound the cost problem.

The Hidden Costs of Fragmentation

Olivares illuminated how Mexico’s fragmented payment ecosystem creates cascading opportunity costs at every level. Different payment types like SPEI for domestic transfers, SWIFT for international transfers, and various platforms for trades each operate with “different protocols, different procedures, different regulations, different infrastructures.”

This lack of coordination imposes costs beyond simple transaction fees. For users, it means lost time, eroded trust, and missed opportunities. Financial institutions sacrifice innovation, competitiveness, and efficiency. At the national level, fragmentation constrains economic growth and development.

“We do know that in Mexico, the different actors of the financial sector — banks, regulators, fintechs — through collaboration schemes, there are shared benefits,” Olivares emphasized. Yet awareness hasn’t translated into action. While 60% of Mexican banks and fintechs claim they have the technical capability and talent for interoperability, only 44% say they’re ready to act.

Technology Isn’t the Problem

The panelists unanimously agreed that Mexico has the technological infrastructure, talent, and investment capacity needed for interoperability. “As a foreigner living in Mexico, we can say that here there’s a lot of talent and the founders and banks know what they do,” Puig, who is from Spain, observed. “They have been working in the industry for quite a long time.”

What's missing is strategic alignment. Traditional institutions entering disruptive fields need security standards and clear governance frameworks. New players need monetizable use cases. Without these elements, even the best technology remains underutilized.

Mexico’s CoDi QR payment system exemplifies this disconnect. Launched years ago with strong technical foundations, it remains underadopted because, as Rumayor noted, the ecosystem lacks coordination. “We have all the pieces, but the pieces are not joined in such a way that they need to be.”

The Real Competition: Cash

Perhaps the panel’s most crucial insight was reframing the competitive landscape. While financial institutions and fintechs often view each other as competitors, Rumayor argued that “we are fighting against cash” as the true adversary.

With more than 85% of transactions in Mexico still cash-based, the opportunity for digital payments remains enormous. Yet individual actors focus on competing for market share within the existing digital ecosystem rather than collaborating to expand it.

“To eliminate cash, it is a humongous activity,” Rumayor stressed. “You have highways or bridges of cash, usability, people that want to have accounts.” This challenge requires ecosystem-wide collaboration, with each player specializing in solving one piece of the puzzle.

Lessons from Global Success Stories

Finnosummit research into successful interoperability implementations in Brazil, India, and Colombia revealed consistent patterns. These markets succeeded by establishing clear governance structures, implementing supportive regulations, and developing compelling use cases that align stakeholder incentives.

The governance piece proves particularly critical. “When talking about standards, one great benefit is that in some way you put clear roles,” Rumayor explained. “Each player knows against who is playing against.” Without clear rules and roles, players operate with different incentives, making coordination nearly impossible.

Mexico has made progress through initiatives like regulatory sandboxes introduced in 2018, allowing controlled collaboration between startups and financial institutions. The Mexican Banking Association has created coordination mechanisms for traditional banks. Yet these efforts remain fragmented, lacking the overarching framework that enabled success elsewhere.

The Blue Ocean Strategy

Albán challenged Mexican financial services providers to shift their focus from competing over existing customers to serving the 50% of the population currently excluded from formal financial services. This “blue ocean” strategy requires a fundamental rethinking of business models.

“What would I do if I were a founder of a fintech?” Albán asked. “Think about QR code payment or less expensive payment systems”" He noted that Mexico remains overly reliant on credit cards, which make business models expensive. Colombia’s e-wallet success story shows an alternative path: wallets succeeded first, only integrating cards after achieving scale and adoption.

The panel suggested several concrete strategies for reaching underserved populations: eliminate or subsidize cash-in costs, build extensive agent networks in underserved areas, simplify user interfaces and processes, develop products that match informal economy realities, and create trust through consistent service delivery.

The Path to Interoperability

The panelists outlined a clear roadmap for achieving true financial interoperability in Latin America:

Establish governance frameworks: Create clear roles, responsibilities, and dispute resolution mechanisms that all players accept.
Align incentives: Develop business models where collaboration benefits all participants more than competition.
Focus on use cases: Build from specific user needs rather than technological capabilities.
Measure impact: Track not just adoption rates but actual improvement in users’ financial lives.
Think ecosystem, not institution: Recognize that no single player can solve financial exclusion alone.

Listening Lab Lessons | From Access to Wellbeing: Designing Financial Tools Women Can Trust and Use

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:54:49 +0000

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the panel “From Access to Wellbeing: Designing Financial Tools Women Can Trust and Use” confronted an uncomfortable truth about Latin America’s financial inclusion efforts: despite years of programs and policies, the gender gap in financial inclusion and wellbeing is widening.

Moderated by Jeffrey Bower, former IFC lead for the financial inclusion of underserved populations, the conversation brought together three leading experts: Carolina Trivelli, senior researcher at Peru’s Institute of Studies (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos) and former Minister of Development and Social Inclusion; María José Roa, an international consultant and researcher with 30 years of research experience; and Pilar Islas Rodríguez, Director General of Nowi Soluciones, which develops financial education programs for vulnerable populations in Mexico. They agreed that counting how many women have bank accounts is not enough. Progress depends on understanding the cultural, structural, and institutional barriers that stop women from using financial services to improve their lives.

The Paradox of Progress

Latin America shows a clear contradiction. As Trivelli noted, “The gender gap in Latin America has not been reduced. Even if there’s more access to products and services, we haven’t been able to translate this into women’s inclusion.” In other emerging markets, gender gaps have narrowed. In Latin America, they persist or have grown.

The COVID-19 pandemic sped up digital financial inclusion through government transfers to e-wallets, but underlying inequalities remain. Roa pointed out that while the holding of digital products has increased and gaps have narrowed in some countries, “the gap in digital skills and digital financial inclusion for women remains high.”

There are also strong differences within the region. Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile show smaller gender gaps; others lag behind. Chile offers one promising example. The financial superintendent in Chile began measuring and publicly reporting discrimination in lending practices. “What is not measured is not seen,” the superintendent concluded. Once Chilean financial institutions saw explicit data on discriminatory lending conditions, it sparked difficult but necessary conversations about reform.

Beyond the Binary of Access

The panelists pushed back against the idea that financial inclusion can be measured only by whether someone has a bank account. “Financial inclusion does not mean having only one financial product,” Roa stressed. “We need a multidimensional lens.”

This complexity appears across all income levels. Even high income, highly educated women face barriers. Many choose less profitable investment products because they do not trust their own financial decisions. When women investment advisors work with these clients, it “radically changes the kind of decisions they make,” said Trivelli.

For lower income women, the obstacles are more basic. Islas Rodríguez’s field research in southern Mexico found that many women do not have their own mobile phones; the family’s single phone belongs to the father or son. In central Mexico, women often have analog phones and use them only for calls. In the north, women may have smartphones but still hold strong cultural beliefs: “The bank is bad. Please do not get a loan. It is a problem that you will have forever.”

The Trust Deficit

A recurring theme was the lack of trust in digital financial services among vulnerable women. Mejía Flores described this gap: “For many people, especially people who are poor, the digital experience is not this vision that it facilitates and streamlines everything. They have a different experience. The digital experience is that the commissions are not clear, or sometimes they are indebted and it’s not clear for them how they are going to pay it off.”

These negative experiences create a vicious cycle. Women often withdraw government transfers in full as cash rather than using digital services, which limits their ability to build a financial history and access credit. “They rather withdraw money and use their cash because they know how to handle it,” Mejía Flores explained.

More apps or products alone will not fix this. In a pilot program where Islas Rodríguez’s organization achieved 54% women's adoption of credit cards, success came from human-centered design: women advisors who understood clients’ realities, peer-to-peer communication, and extensive education on best practices. Trust was built through relationships, not algorithms.

The Informal Economy Reality

Latin America’s large informal economy adds another layer of complexity. Trivelli noted that in countries like Peru, while 67% of women work, 89% are self-employed or in the informal sector, often juggling caregiving with income generation. “By definition, their entrepreneurship and their livelihoods are more fragile,” she explained.

Yet financial institutions often design products for formal workers or for businesses that are expected to grow quickly. These products do not match many women’s lives. “The financial institutions have a fantastic product aimed at women, the advisors are experts, but the objective is that they make their business grow,” Trivelli said. “Many women cannot make their business grow because they do not have the right time to work.”

Instead of trying to replace informal practices, the panelists called for recognizing and strengthening them. Women already manage complex financial lives through tandas (rotating savings groups) and community lending schemes. As Islas Rodríguez observed, “Women are using financial services. Most of them are using informal ones.”

National Strategies: Necessary but Not Sufficient

Mexico is developing a national financial inclusion strategy with a specific focus on indigenous women, a unique example in the region. Still, the panelists cautioned against overestimating what strategies alone can achieve.

“National financial inclusion strategies have been heavily criticized,” Trivelli acknowledged. “Because they stay on paper, because they’re not sufficiently robust, because they don’t mobilize resources.” Yet she defended their role as a coordination tool: “The challenge of women’s financial inclusion is multidimensional, and therefore requires various articulated policies and a consensus in the initial diagnosis. This is impossible to happen in a vacuum.”

The real test is implementation. Many strategies recognize women’s financial exclusion in their diagnostics but stop there, without gender-specific objectives. Without measurable goals, specific actions, governance and responsibilities, and resources, efforts remain fragmented and weak.

Effective strategies need legitimacy through multi-stakeholder participation, institutionalization, broad socialization, and constant measurement, monitoring and evaluation. They must also recognize that financial inclusion is a means, not the final objective. “Financial inclusion is a means to reach financial health, financial wellbeing, better management of our finances,” Trivelli emphasized.

The Stakes of Inclusion

The discussion underscored that women’s financial inclusion is not only a fairness issue; it is central to economic development. Women with economic independence face less violence, gain more decision-making power, and invest more in their families’ wellbeing.

Reaching that point requires more than extending existing products to women. It calls for a fundamental rethink of how financial services are designed, delivered, and regulated, that take into account the invisible barrier of gender social norms

As Latin America confronts widening gender gaps after years of financial inclusion programs, the panel’s insights suggest that the next phase must focus on women’s lived realities. Progress depends on institutions understanding and responding to women’s complex economic lives. The goal is not just inclusion on paper, but financial health and wellbeing that allow women to thrive in increasingly digital economies.

Pathways Forward

The panelists pointed to several concrete steps for improving women’s financial inclusion:

Transparency and measurement: Following Chile’s example, institutions should publicly report gender-disaggregated data on product use, lending conditions, and service quality.
Product design with women’s input: Institutions should design products based on women’s real financial needs and constraints, not simply rebrand products originally made for men.
Recognition of intersectionality: Women are not a single group. Strategies must reflect the different realities of indigenous women, rural women, entrepreneurs, and others.
Understanding, measuring and removing gender social norms that limit women’s financial inclusion is imperative.
Building on existing practices: Strengthen informal financial mechanisms that women already trust, instead of trying to displace them.
Addressing structural barriers: Financial inclusion efforts must align with labor, education, and social policies to tackle deeper inequalities. This transversality is key.
Including peers to answer questions and support the development of women’s financial capabilities is key.
Focus on financial health, not just access: Success should be measured by women’s ability to manage resources, build resilience, and improve their wellbeing.

Listening Lab Lessons | From Policy to Practice: Financial Inclusion in Mexico

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:49:31 +0000

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the panel “From Policy to Practice: Financial Inclusion in Mexico” brought together an unlikely coalition of stakeholders all working to reimagine financial infrastructure from the ground up. Moderated by Lizette Neme Bechara, the discussion featured Patricia Legarreta from Financiera del Bienestar, Mexico’s government development bank; Erick Huerta Velázquez from Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias, an indigenous-owned telecommunications cooperative; and Natalia Cueto from Vadi, a blockchain-based community investment platform.

Their conversation revealed a fundamental shift in how Mexico approaches financial inclusion: moving beyond the traditional model of extending corporate banking services to underserved populations, and instead building entirely new infrastructures owned and operated by the communities themselves.

The Infrastructure-Trust Nexus

The panel began with a stark reality check about Mexico’s financial landscape. As Cueto illustrated from her experience living in a small town in the state of Colima, “The only bank is Bienestar. There are two ATMs and if I need to withdraw money, I have the Oxxo store. Otherwise, I have to go to Colima City.” This geographic exclusion compounds with what she calls the “complex financial lives” of rural residents, characterized by frequent, small-value transactions at multiple local vendors, a pattern that traditional banks find unprofitable to serve.

But the challenge runs deeper than physical access. Legarreta identified a critical trust deficit rooted in negative digital experiences. “For many people, especially people who are poor, the digital experience is not this vision that it facilitates and streamlines everything,” she explained. “They have a different experience. The digital experience is that the commissions are not clear, for example, or sometimes they are indebted and it's not clear for them how they are going to pay it off.”

This distrust creates a vicious cycle: people withdraw government benefits immediately as cash rather than using digital services, limiting their ability to build financial histories and access credit. The solution, the panelists argued, requires not just better technology but fundamentally different ownership models.

Community Ownership as Financial Infrastructure

Huerta Velázquez's work with Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias demonstrates how telecommunications and financial services can be integrated through community investment structures. The organization operates as Mexico’s fourth mobile network operator, owned entirely by indigenous communities.

He shared an example from a rural indigenous university in Puebla’s northern mountains, where students formed a collective to provide their own mobile service. “Since this university gives summer courses to external students, when they find out this, they say ‘I want to switch to what you offer,’” Huerta Velázquez recounted. The collective grew to fund not just telecommunications but also device purchases for students who couldn’t afford computers, creating what he calls “an investment and credit scheme that doesn’t necessarily go through a Fintech or a bank, but through local organization with local resources.”

This approach addresses what Huerta Velázquez identifies as a fundamental extraction problem: “We break the extraction cycle. It is not that they extract the money so the service is provided to the community; the resources stay there using the money of the community itself.”

Blockchain for the Barrio

Cueto’s platform Vadi uses blockchain to enable local investment in small businesses, though she emphasizes that the technology itself isn’t the point. “We got to a point in the development of blockchain technology where it’s not important to understand if it’s nodes connecting at the same time and sharing information,” she explained. “It's like with the dawn of the Internet. I don’t know what a protocol is or whatever. I click on that and that’s it.”

The platform connects to Mexico’s tax authority through Open Finance to provide transparency for investors while helping transform complex financial data into information that “non-sophisticated investors” can understand. All projects must align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, creating a values-based investment ecosystem.

Cueto shared an anecdote about informal community finance already at work: “Three months ago, this lady had a clothing store, she had to close it and then she met with the neighbors to reopen the store and they all collected the money to rent the place and then she reopened the store and repaid the neighbors.” Her observation was pointed: “What they did is private equity collection... When you make things easy, in how many stores can this be replicated?”

Government as Platform, Not Provider

Legarreta presented Financiera del Bienestar’s transformation from a traditional state bank into what she calls a platform for financial inclusion. The institution already operates 2,700 physical branches, however presence alone doesn’t equal inclusion.

“We want to eliminate the neoliberal model,” Legarreta stated. “This is how we call it: The state subsidized the companies and the poorest people had to pay for those services.” Instead, Bienestar is working to become infrastructure that other institutions, including cooperatives and microfinance organizations, can build upon.

This requires legislative reform, as current Mexican fintech law doesn’t contemplate public institutions providing digital financial services. But even within existing constraints, Bienestar is digitizing services and working with over 260 partners to expand reach.

The Gender Dimension

When asked about women’s financial inclusion, the panelists revealed telling patterns. Legarreta noted that in Bienestar’s credit programs, “more than 70% [of those supported] are women … but this is something that happened in the free market” because women demonstrated consistently better repayment rates.

Cueto emphasized the need to understand women’s complex daily realities: “I wake up, I take my child to school, I buy lunch, but I also do my house chores, but I was also working, but I also gave employment... Everything women do should be incorporated in the tech and digital lives.”

The discussion highlighted how existing informal finance mechanisms like tandas, which are rotating savings clubs, are predominantly managed by women, suggesting that recognizing and strengthening these existing systems might be more effective than imposing new technologies.

Beyond Regulatory Sandboxes

The panel revealed a tension between Mexico’s ambitious fintech law, that was intended to make the country a Latin American fintech hub, and the reality of grassroots innovation. As Cueto noted, despite Mexico having the second highest number of fintechs in Latin America, “we haven’t been successful being a hub.”

The panelists suggested the problem lies in treating regulation as the primary driver of innovation rather than recognizing existing community practices. Huerta Velázquez argued for expanding the definition of financial services beyond traditional banking: “We have to expand this field of financial services and financial inclusion because this can be done through local organization.”

An audience member highlighted Mexico’s underutilized success story: CoDi, the QR-code payment system launched in 2004 and recognized internationally, yet still underadopted compared to Brazil's Pix. The difference, according to the panelists? Brazil mandated adoption while Mexico left it to bank discretion, a cautionary tale about the limits of voluntary adoption.

Implications for Global Development

The Mexican experiments presented in this panel challenge several orthodoxies in financial inclusion:

Technology isn't neutral: Every digital system embeds assumptions about users’ lives, capabilities, and resources. Systems designed for urban, educated users will inevitably exclude others.
Ownership matters more than access: Community-controlled infrastructure creates different incentive structures than corporate-provided services, keeping value local rather than extractive.
Trust precedes adoption: Without addressing negative past experiences with digital services, new technologies will face resistance regardless of their technical merits.
Informal systems are sophisticated: Rather than replacing community finance mechanisms, technology should strengthen and scale existing practices.
Government’s role is evolving: From direct service provider to platform enabler, public institutions must reimagine their function in digital ecosystems.

As Mexico continues these experiments, questions remain unanswered. Can community-owned telecommunications networks provide sustainable alternatives to corporate infrastructure? Can blockchain enable local investment without financialization? Can government banks become genuine platforms for inclusion rather than just another service provider?

The preliminary answers emerging from Mexico’s diverse innovators suggest that financial inclusion requires not just extending existing systems to new users, but fundamentally reimagining who owns, operates, and benefits from financial infrastructure. As Huerta Velázquez concluded, these models allow communities to “distribute wealth” rather than concentrate it, a proposition that may prove essential for genuine financial inclusion.

Listening Lab Lessons | Human Rights by Design: Financial Infrastructure that Works for Everyone

Ayden Férdeline — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:44:48 +0000

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the panel ‘Human Rights by Design: Financial Infrastructure that Works for Everyone’ posed a provocative question: What happens when we encode political decisions into payment systems that instantly affect millions of people worldwide? The answer, according to a diverse group of technologists, legal scholars, and public interest advocates, reveals fundamental tensions in how we build and govern digital financial infrastructure.

“Code is law,” panel moderator Ayden Férdeline of the Interledger Foundation reminded the audience, invoking Lawrence Lessig’s famous dictum. But unlike traditional legislation bounded by national borders, financial technology becomes instantly global. “A payment system coded abroad immediately affects mezcal producers here in Mexico, local artisans, families receiving remittances,” Férdeline noted. “Every line of code embodies political choices about who can participate, what behavior is suspicious, and whose money can flow freely.”

The Intensification Effect

The panel’s central insight challenges a common assumption in financial inclusion circles: that digitization inherently democratizes access to financial services. Instead, panelists argued that digital transformation without deliberate intervention amplifies existing inequalities.

Alix Dunn, host of “The Computer Says No” podcast and director of the consultancy The Maybe, offered a stark reframing borrowed from academic Lucy Suchman: rather than artificial intelligence, we should think of AI as “algorithmic intensification.” This lens applies equally to financial digitization. “If there’s existing inequality that we’re not engaging with directly, digitizing those spaces will just intensify that issue that was there to begin with,” Dunn explained.

Nasser Eledroos, a U.S.-based public interest technologist and policy strategist, illustrated this intensification through the hidden assumptions embedded in digital financial systems. “The digital financial world assumes a few things: that you have a device, that you have the literacy to use that device or to use the financial structures within it, and you have an ID,” they noted. Those lacking any of these prerequisites — often migrants, refugees, or the economically precarious — find themselves not just excluded but further marginalized as systems become mandatory rather than optional.

The Architecture of Friction

Perhaps nowhere is the political nature of financial infrastructure more visible than in the strategic deployment of “friction”: the deliberate slowing or blocking of certain transactions. Eledroos described how keywords in transactions, such as country names associated with sanctions, can trigger automatic blocks on payments or accounts, even when the transaction itself is entirely lawful. For instance, ordering food from an Iranian restaurant can later pose compliance questions from a financial service provider.

“What is usually the most frictionless experience when you're using any type of financial system? It’s spending money,” Eledroos observed. “And what is often one of the most difficult ways in which you experience friction? It’s either getting it back or moving from system to system.” This asymmetry reveals how power operates through code: those who control interoperability control economic participation.

The progression from optional to mandatory infrastructure particularly concerned Dunn, who traced how technologies marketed as opportunities for inclusion become requirements for participation. “There’s a spectrum of adoption when something new enters the world, and it starts out feeling very optional,” Dunn explained. “But over time... it can quickly become required... something that felt like an option becomes a form of exclusion.”

Open Source as Counter-Infrastructure

Against this backdrop of corporate-controlled systems, Ed Cable from the Mifos Initiative presented open source technology as a potential counterweight. The approach has shown promise in Mexico, where Finabien adapted open source core banking software to offer disaster relief loans as well as tailored small business lending.

“Open source helps to level that playing field,” Cable argued. “It helps to give access to the local providers, and then it puts that control in the hands of the government and beyond those corporate interests.” By enabling cooperatives, microfinance institutions, and governments to control their own digital infrastructure without extensive IT budgets, open source approaches offer an alternative to corporate dominance.

However, open source alone doesn't solve governance challenges. As Hannah Draper from the FGV Law School emphasized, the critical question is who participates in system design and oversight.

Governance Lessons from Brazil and India

The contrasting experiences of Brazil’s Pix and India’s UPI payment systems illuminate the importance of inclusive governance from inception. India’s UPI, while achieving extraordinary scale and interoperability, was designed primarily by banks and fintech companies through the National Payments Corporation of India. Consumer protection agencies and civil society were absent from the design process, leading to retroactive attempts to address issues of consent, grievance handling, and liability.

Brazil’s Pix, though initially following a similar technocratic approach, evolved to include broader stakeholder participation through the Pix Forum. This body now includes over 130 institutions including IDEC, Brazil’s leading consumer protection organization. IDEC’s involvement led to concrete improvements, including built-in fraud dispute mechanisms, addressing a critical concern as sophisticated fraud has surged alongside payment system adoption.

“Regulation can mirror and further re-entrench existing power dynamics, or it can also be used to rebalance them,” Draper explained. Meaningful regulation requires “pre-emptive protection for consumers, not just reactive redress mechanisms” and “accountability across the system’s value chain.”

The Infrastructure Paradox

The panel surfaced a fundamental tension in infrastructure development. As Dunn noted, infrastructure’s value lies partly in its invisibility: we shouldn't have to think about the pipes when we turn on a tap. This invisibility, however, creates opportunities for corporate capture when citizens and regulators look away.

This session was interactive and informed by live audience polling in the room. The audience poll at the session’s start revealed these concerns weren’t just theoretical: corporate control and privacy and surveillance concerns topped attendees’ worries about digital financial infrastructure. Only 15% believed local ownership would increase their trust in digital payment systems, suggesting skepticism about alternatives to corporate platforms.

Toward Accountable Infrastructure

The panel’s discussion points toward design principles for financial infrastructure that serves economic justice rather than entrenching inequality:

Inclusive governance from inception: Brazil's Pix Forum model demonstrates the value of multistakeholder participation, but such mechanisms must be built in from the start rather than added retroactively.
Open source alternatives with local control: Technology alone doesn’t determine outcomes, but open source tools can enable community-controlled infrastructure when paired with appropriate governance.
Recognition of infrastructure’s political nature: Abandoning the fiction of neutral technology enables more honest discussions about whose interests systems serve.
Preservation of non-digital options: As systems become mandatory, maintaining alternatives becomes a human rights imperative.
Institutional rather than individual resistance: While individual refusal can raise awareness, systemic change requires institutional actors to reject exclusionary systems.

As financial infrastructure increasingly mediates economic participation globally, the stakes of these design choices grow ever higher. The question isn’t whether to embed values in code: that is inevitable. The question is whose values will prevail, and whether affected communities will have meaningful say in systems that determine their economic futures.

Are Financial Rights Human Rights?

Ayden Férdeline — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:13:45 +0000

Financial rights refer to the ability of individuals to access, use, and control financial services and resources in ways that support their autonomy, agency, and overall well-being. This encompasses not only access to essential financial services—such as payments, savings, credit, and insurance—but also rights associated with financial consumer protection, including transparency, protection from unfair or discriminatory practices, mechanisms for redress, and financial privacy.

While not yet widely recognized as standalone human rights, financial rights can be understood as deriving from other fundamental human rights. The ability to access financial services is essential for exercising rights such as access to education, healthcare, and an adequate standard of living. The exclusion of over 1.7 billion adults from formal financial systems raises serious human rights concerns, perpetuating cycles of poverty and marginalization. Recognizing financial participation as an enabler of human rights is therefore crucial for ensuring these interconnected and inalienable rights are fully realized. Rather than framing financial inclusion as an isolated issue, it should be increasingly understood as substantiating a broader economic right that allows people to actively participate in financial and economic life.

The Legal Foundation of Financial Rights

International human rights originate from multiple legal sources, including international conventions, customary international law, general principles recognized by nations, and judicial decisions. Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice explicitly identifies these sources as fundamental to defining rights under international law. Human rights, including the right to financial agency, evolve through a combination of legal agreements, state practices, and widely accepted legal principles.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 establishes economic and social rights, most notably in Article 25, which states:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

This provision underscores the inherent connection between economic stability and human dignity. These rights increasingly depend on access to fair and inclusive financial services in a globalized financial economy. Without mechanisms that enable financial participation, individuals are effectively denied their agency in economic decision-making.

Although Article 25 does not explicitly mention financial access, its spirit is deeply intertwined with the need for an inclusive financial system. Economic and social security cannot be realized without mechanisms that facilitate economic participation, enable wealth accumulation, and ensure financial resilience. Financial exclusion, therefore, is not just an economic disadvantage—it is a direct impediment to realizing fundamental human rights.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of 1976 builds upon this framework by obligating states to take steps to realize these rights fully. Article 11 states that it:

“... recognize[s] the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.”

This provision thus imposes a duty on states to implement measures that promote financial stability and enable substantive financial participation, rather than merely providing access. Furthermore, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights emphasize corporate responsibility in preventing financial exclusion, recognizing that businesses play a significant role in ensuring equitable access to economic resources.

Financial Exclusion as a Human Rights Violation

Digital financial exclusion disproportionately affects women, rural populations, and individuals with disabilities. Without access to digital financial services, these communities are locked out of opportunities for wealth generation, entrepreneurship, and participation in the digital economy. Instead of solely focusing on the unbanked, financial rights should be framed as the right to economic agency in a system that is evolving beyond traditional banking.

In addition to economic implications, digital financial exclusion can limit political and social participation. In societies where financial services are increasingly digitized, the inability to access digital banking and payment systems restricts individuals from accessing government benefits, making online purchases, or engaging in civic activities requiring digital financial transactions. This creates a cycle of disenfranchisement that extends beyond the economy and into broader societal exclusion. Thus, ensuring financial access is not just about inclusion but restoring agency to those systematically excluded from economic participation.

The rapid digitization of financial services has also introduced new risks of exclusion. While financial technology has the potential to expand access, it often assumes that users have Internet connectivity, digital and financial literacy, and access to identification documents. These prerequisites can become significant barriers for those who are already financially marginalized. To substantiate financial rights, policymakers and innovators must reimagine economic structures in ways that do not simply replicate the exclusionary aspects of traditional banking but create alternative models for financial agency.

The Derivative Nature of Digital Financial Inclusion

Digital financial inclusion operates as a derivative right—one that enables individuals to claim other fundamental rights. In a digital economy, the ability to access credit, savings, and fair financial services is increasingly mediated through digital infrastructure. This includes access to devices, mobile connectivity, digital identity systems, and the digital skills needed to navigate these platforms effectively. The right to credit, savings, and fair financial services extends the right to be free from poverty. Economic rights are often contingent on access to financial mechanisms; without financial services (digital or otherwise), individuals lack the means to exercise their legal rights to property, enter into contracts, or engage in commerce. In digital contexts, barriers such as algorithmic discrimination, opaque automated decision-making, and lack of digital literacy can further entrench exclusion. The issue is not just about financial inclusion but ensuring that financial structures serve as tools for autonomy rather than barriers to participation.

The doctrine of positive obligations in human rights law supports this classification. Governments have a duty to refrain from actions that impede rights and to take proactive measures to ensure that essential preconditions for rights realization are met. Just as states must provide educational infrastructure to fulfill the right to education, they must also implement regulatory frameworks that guarantee financial access. In digital contexts, this includes investing in connectivity infrastructure, promoting digital literacy, ensuring accessibility standards for digital platforms, and regulating data use and automated decision-making systems to prevent discrimination and abuse. In regional human rights instruments, similar obligations exist. The European Social Charter affirms the right to social and economic protection, including financial services. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights similarly recognizes the right to economic, social, and cultural development, which is unattainable without financial participation. As digital channels become dominant, fulfilling these rights increasingly depends on equitable access to digital financial systems.Likewise, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has established jurisprudence that links economic participation to broader human rights frameworks, affirming that economic marginalization can constitute a human rights violation.

National legal frameworks also reflect the growing recognition of financial access as a human right. Several countries have enshrined financial inclusion policies into law. In India, while the Supreme Court has not explicitly declared access to banking a fundamental right, jurisprudence under Article 21 has expanded the right to life in ways that support arguments for financial inclusion as a constitutional entitlement—particularly in the context of welfare delivery, Aadhaar-linked services, and state obligations to ensure dignity and livelihood. South Africa’s Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act has been interpreted to require financial institutions to take active steps to prevent exclusion. In the United States, the Community Reinvestment Act mandates that financial institutions serve low-income and marginalized communities, reinforcing the idea that financial access is a societal obligation rather than a discretionary service. Some countries have also introduced digital-specific legislation—such as data protection laws, digital identity regulations, or fintech oversight mechanisms—that aim to ensure digital financial systems uphold human rights standards, particularly around consent, transparency, and redress.

Legal scholars have identified multiple pathways through which human rights, including financial rights, become recognized as international norms. International treaties and agreements remain the most explicit statements of human rights, carrying the greatest legal weight. However, human rights can also emerge through customary international law, which derives from consistent state practices and a general acceptance of certain rights as binding legal obligations. Judicial decisions and legal scholarship further reinforce these rights by interpreting existing legal frameworks and shaping their application to new challenges. As digital technologies reshape the financial landscape, new international norms are emerging at the intersection of digital rights and economic rights. These include growing recognition of digital connectivity, data protection, and algorithmic accountability as essential to enabling meaningful financial participation. This dynamic process of rights formation means that a legal recognition of digital financial inclusion as a human right can continue to evolve in response to technological and economic changes.

Affirming the Role of Digital Financial Inclusion in Human Rights

While digital financial inclusion is not yet recognized as an independent human right, it is a structural necessity that facilitates the enjoyment of other internationally recognized rights. Rather than solely advocating for financial inclusion, the focus should be on recognizing and substantiating the right to financial participation as a fundamental economic right.

The Interledger Foundation is committed to further investigating the role of digital financial inclusion in the broader human rights landscape. As financial technology continues to evolve, it is essential to ensure that emerging digital financial systems are designed with accessibility, fairness, and human rights in mind. By expanding beyond traditional banking models and rethinking financial access as a matter of economic rights, we can advocate for a more inclusive, empowering, and innovative financial ecosystem. We support research, advocacy, and policy engagement efforts to advance digital financial inclusion as a core human rights issue, and we are working to build an equitable global financial system that serves everyone, everywhere.

Strengthening Interledger’s Voice in Public Policy

Ayden Férdeline — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 16:51:13 +0000

The Interledger Foundation believes society benefits from technology most when it's built with open source standards, protocols, and software. Our bold and ambitious goal is to increase individuals’ autonomy and agency while building more equitable financial systems. We consider digital public infrastructure in broader and more inclusive ways than others do. We see the Internet as a global public good, and we want people to be secure, empowered, and informed to make meaningful choices about their finances. We advocate for a level playing field when it comes to online technologies, markets, and financial systems. We see the opportunity that interoperable technologies can bring in making that a reality. We believe that digital and financial literacy are essential for everyone, and that access must be accompanied by meaningful capacity building efforts.

This perspective must be well represented within the institutions that shape global agenda-setting and decision-making processes on these issues. These institutions include the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the European Union’s various bodies, national foreign ministries, and other national and regional institutions with similar mandates. To date, the Interledger Foundation has engaged in these spaces through ad hoc contributions, such as our participation last year at NetMundial+10 in São Paulo, the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, and the Internet Governance Forum in Riyadh. Now, the time is right to make this a core focus—engaging strategically and systematically in the right opportunities, within the right institutions, to advance our vision and mission effectively.

I recently joined the Interledger Foundation as Lead, Public Policy and Government Affairs, a role seated within the Programs team, which is responsible for strategic influence. Over the coming weeks I will be working on an initial plan for how we will make sure our perspective is represented within intergovernmental or international fora, and then my role will shift to one of coordinating and executing on that agenda. This engagement plan will be reviewed and updated annually – and as new issues and opportunities emerge – and I will work closely with internal colleagues, our community and Interledger Ambassadors, and external stakeholders to make sure we are singing in harmony if not unison. I also expect to be working with colleagues to drive more thought leadership material: policy briefs, position papers, official submissions to public consultations, Op-Eds, talking points, model laws, and regulatory engagement.

Please send me an email or write to me on our community Slack if you’d like to collaborate or if there’s something on the horizon you’d like to flag for my attention.

Ayden Férdeline — ILF Ambassador Final Report

Ayden Férdeline — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 15:20:41 +0000

I have now wrapped up my Interledger research ambassadorship. Since my last update in November 2024, I traveled to Riyadh for the 19th annual United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF). At the IGF, I socialized the working paper that the Dynamic Coalition on Digital Financial Inclusion has been working on throughout 2024. This document will continue to evolve, and my ambition post-ambassadorship is to continue this work and to launch the final version of these principles at a high-level event in 2025.

Dynamic Coalition on Digital Financial Inclusion

The Dynamic Coalition on Digital Financial Inclusion serves as a deliberative space for policy discussions on digital financial inclusion within the IGF framework, designed to develop evidence-informed recommendations that reflect the perspectives of a diverse, multistakeholder group. My role as chair of this working group has been to act as a rapporteur, facilitating dialogue, capturing insights, and helping the coalition reach consensus on different topics.

Since my last update, the coalition has met virtually to prepare a working draft Statement of Principles, which you can read here. I then presented this work at the IGF in Riyadh last month alongside Briana Marbury, the President and CEO of the Interledger Foundation, during a lightning talk on December 15th.

While the IGF was not without hiccups – we had to postpone one of our two IGF sessions – it was nonetheless an opportunity to meet with distinguished delegates and to seek input on our draft work product. The Dynamic Coalition is convening next on February 13, 2025 to review the comments we have received from stakeholders in government, the private sector, and civil society. We plan to revise the Statement of Principles based on this input, and to ready them for a high-level launch event in Oslo in June for the 20th annual IGF.

A huge thank you to all our contributors, especially those from the Interledger community, who actively participated in this process. I will continue to post on this forum about the future of the Dynamic Coalition and our 2025 work plan, as there will be new opportunities to engage with this working group in the coming months.

2025 and the Future of Internet Governance

This year will be a pivotal one for Internet governance. Two decades after the adoption of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society in 2005, the United Nation’s WSIS+20 process will reflect on the progress made and outline priorities for the next decade. We will also see whether the IGF’s mandate is extended beyond Oslo, or if it will be disbanded.

Since the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2005, the Internet has transformed dramatically, with the number of users growing from 500 million to over 5 billion. Emerging technologies like AI, 5G, and satellite Internet now dominate global discourse, while digital public infrastructure and financial inclusion have become central to discussions of sustainable development. Given this, it is difficult for me to imagine that the UN would see no value in renewing the IGF’s mandate and would abdicate the leadership it has already shown in this arena, but stranger things have happened. The WSIS+20 process, which will culminate in a resolution by the UN General Assembly in December 2025 and, I hope, resourcing to implement it, will likely address critical issues such as:

Bridging digital divides within and between nations.
Strengthening cybersecurity and safeguarding human rights online.
Managing emerging technologies and the geopolitical tensions they create.
Promoting digital public infrastructure and online payment systems (not necessarily interoperable payment protocols).

What we do this year will plant the seeds for the next decade of Internet governance, setting the stage for WSIS+30 in 2035. One of my focuses in 2025 is to engage in processes, and to persuade other stakeholders, to align the 11 WSIS Action Lines more closely with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to show that there are solutions that already exist, and which could be scaled up, to address these important issues. Without getting too political, I am afraid bipartisanship is a thing of the past in some democracies, and some dominant state funders of public interest technology projects may be scaling back their support of Internet freedom initiatives. Non-state and non-market actors need to find a way to communicate how such initiatives are not a zero-sum game. For now, I am leaning in on the Global Digital Compact (GDC), adopted in September 2024, as a framework to guide my engagement efforts, as the GDC recognizes that the future of humankind is digital and based on international cooperation and solidarity.

What’s Next?

I’m joining the team at the Interledger Foundation as Lead, Public Policy and Government Affairs. In this role, I hope to continue building out initiatives which bring lawmakers, policymakers, and regulators into direct dialogue with the Interledger community to demonstrate how responsible, interoperable payment systems can and do drive digital financial inclusion. And I will continue to serve as rapporteur for the Dynamic Coalition on Digital Financial Inclusion. In 2025, the Dynamic Coalition’s focus will be on:

Refining and finalizing the Statement of Principles for a high-level launch at the IGF in Oslo (June 2025).
Engaging with other IGF Dynamic Coalitions to build synergies and expand our impact.
Building out a broader coalition of like-minded organizations, collectives, and initiatives to sign on to this Statement of Principles and to begin operationalizing them.
Contributing to the broader WSIS+20 discussions, ensuring that digital financial inclusion becomes a core element of global digital policy frameworks.