Rafiki Updates - June

Hello everyone! Here's what we've been up to over the last month:

People's Clearinghouse Work Week

Last month, several team members traveled to Oaxaca to collaborate with the People's Clearinghouse (PCH) team on advancing the integration of Rafiki within the US–Mexico remittance corridor. As with previous work weeks, we focused on multiple tracks, one of which was the Rafiki integration. Our goal was to address key questions raised by the PCH team and determine what updates or features Rafiki needs to support their requirements.

At a high level, there were three questions we focused on:

1. KYC (Know Your Customer) information exchange:
   Working in a regulated space, PCH needs to be able to receive KYC about the sending person from the US entity. We brainstormed and planned out several ways this can be done in a generalized way for future Rafiki deployments as well.

2. Block payments on KYC/AML Failure
   Related to the above, as part of the payment processing, PCH's Rafiki integration server needs to run AML (Anti-Money Laundering) checks, and block any potentially fraudulent transactions. For their use case, a Rafiki to Rafiki payment should not complete unless approved directly by the receiver (PCH). We discussed a few ways this can be done, through some additional communication between Rafiki and the integration server.

3. Payment confirmation
   When an outgoing payment completes on the sending Rafiki's side (see webhook handler documentation), the Account Servicing Entity (ASE) debits the senders account. This happens in asynchronously with the receiver being credited when the receiving ASE processes an incoming payment completed webhook. In practice, these processes happen without much time in between. However, the PCH team asked: is there a way in Rafiki where the receiving ASE can notify the sending ASE about when funds actually get to the recipient? This is another question & objective we had during the work week that we were brainstorming solutions for.

In general, we found an overarching solution that handles these three questions/objectives - and we will be working hard throughout the year to incorporate some of the great discussions and feedback we've received in our cooperation with the team in Oaxaca.

Releases

This week, we are planning a release (actually, you can make that release*s* 😉) incorporating all of the work that we have been up to since May's v1.1.2-beta. This will include quite a few shiny things - so stay tuned to the releases page.

Enjoy June, and see you in July!