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

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.