Brief Project Description
Nepal Interledger Financial Network (NIFN) is a non-profit initiative led by the Nepal Internet Foundation (NIF) to build an interoperable digital financial network connecting financial institutions across Nepal using the Interledger Protocol (ILP)/Rafiki. NIFN enables cooperative members to hold digital wallets, transfer funds, and access core financial services over a single, unified rail. The network integrates directly with cooperatives and their existing core banking systems (CBS), including those that still operate on on-premises private cloud infrastructure, supporting their transition toward digitally enabled operations.The initiative is grounded in financial inclusion. By connecting cooperatives with banks and financial institutions (BFIs) on a common protocol, NIFN aims to enable millions of cooperative members to send and receive money domestically and cross-border with merchant payments efficiently, securely, and in real time.
Project Update
NIFN has progressed on two parallel fronts since the last update: platform engineering and outreach and partner on-boarding side.
On the engineering side, the team has progressed from building individual platform components to integration, deployment, and production hardening. Core cooperative and wallet workflows - onboarding, member management, wallet activation, balance inquiry, and fund transfers - are implemented and under active refinement.
The platform has been deployed to a VPS provided by Silver Lining Pvt. Ltd. On the integration front, the team has completed integration with Planet Earth CBS in a live test environment, and has exchanged APIs with Chanakya CBS and successfully tested connectivity from the NIFN server. Settlement engine work has also been finalised. Beyond the middleware, the team has deployed an AI-powered NIFN knowledge assistant across the official NIFN website, the sandbox and operator consoles, the web wallet, and the iOS/Android mobile wallet app.
On the outreach and partner on-boarding side, NIF conducted five orientation programs in Kathmandu Metropolitan City (Ward No.7), Tokha Municipality (Ward No.4), Lalitpur Metropolitan City (Ward No.15), Bhangaha Municipality (Mahottari District, Ward No.9), and Hetauda Sub-Metropolitan City (Ward No.2), reaching representatives from approximately 140 cooperative participations. These sessions introduced cooperatives to NIFN, interoperable digital payments, secure digital transactions, and cybersecurity awareness - while also surfacing real feedback on cooperatives' existing digital maturity and pain points, which is now feeding back into platform design.
Additionally on strategic-partnership front, NIFN formalised two international MoUs during this period, extending the platform's reach beyond domestic cooperatives toward cross-border payments.
AltPayNet - registered in the Philippines, with an office network spanning Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malta, Malaysia, the USA, Australia, and Germany. The partnership will enable cross-border transactions through the NIFN platform and provide white-label payment services, giving NIFN a route to seamless, secure payment processing across those markets.
Hamal Consulting - Remittance agency registered in Copenhagen, Denmark working since last 15 years. The partnership is centred on establishing cross-border payment connectivity between Nepal and international markets including Denmark and the wider European region together with remittance services for the Nepali diaspora, delivered through the NIFN platform.
The current focus is production readiness: validating real-CBS behavior end-to-end, completing external API integrations, structured load testing, hardening authentication and session management, and refining settlement and reconciliation.
Project Impact & Target Audience(s)
NIFN's primary beneficiaries are cooperative institutions and their members across Nepal - a sector that plays an outsized role in community-level and rural financial inclusion but has historically faced barriers to digital transformation, interoperability, and cybersecurity readiness. By connecting cooperatives to a shared interoperable financial rail, NIFN aims to give members in semi-urban and rural areas - who are often underserved by mainstream banking infrastructure - access to faster, safer, and more transparent digital financial services.
The orientation programs specifically engaged cooperative representatives across different municipalities (Kathmandu, Lalitpur, Mahottari, and Hetauda), reflecting a deliberate effort to reach beyond the capital and into diverse local communities. This work directly supports the Interledger Foundation's mission of expanding financial inclusion through open, interoperable payment infrastructure, while also raising cybersecurity and digital-safety awareness among institutions that are often first-time adopters of digital financial tools.
Progress on Objectives, Key Activities
Referencing our original proposal, here is where each major objective/workstream stands to date:
Core Platform & Cooperative Onboarding
Cooperative onboarding, member management, wallet activation, balance inquiry, fund transfers, and admin/operator dashboards are implemented, with ongoing refinement based on QA and real-environment testing.
Wallet & Accounts
Wallet UI, wallet-to-wallet transfers, linked-account flows, load-fund workflows, and transaction statements (including PDF export) are built and in active integration/optimization.
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Middleware & External Integrations
Rafiki / Interledger - Webhook-based transaction processing is integrated and tested as part of the end-to-end transaction lifecycle. GraphQL behaviour and load-test performance remain under ongoing analysis.
Planet Earth CBS - API integration complete. Planet Earth has added a "Co-op Transfer via NIFN" feature to its existing mobile app, and the team has successfully executed fund transfers through it in a live test environment.
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Chanakya CBS - Endpoints have been exchanged, tested, and validated on both sides. The team is actively following up on next-stage integration from both an operational and a technical standpoint.
Finacle XML Adapter - An XML-to-JSON adapter has been built so that Finacle's XML responses can flow into NIFN's JSON-based services. The account enquiry endpoint has been successfully tested and validated, and the team is actively working toward broader integration.
Settlement Engine - The settlement engine design has been finalised in consultation with NIFN's advisors, together with the design of reconciliation files, commission flows, and CBS settlement reporting.
Database & Data Layer
Cooperative, Member, user, linked-account, wallet-balance structures implemented; ongoing work on schema validation, indexing, query optimization, backup/recovery strategy, async API conversion, and database security research (access control, encryption, integrity), etc..
QA, Automation & Performance
Functional and regression testing across platform, operator(NIFN admin & cooperative admin), wallet, and mobile flows; Selenium (Java) automation expanding; API-level and full-transaction-flow load testing ongoing, with methodology and reporting being formalized for financial-grade correctness and reconciliation validation.
Deployment & Infrastructure
The platform is deployed on a VPS provided by Silver Lining Pvt. Ltd., where the infrastructure has been separated into three dedicated servers - a Middleware server, a Database server, and an ILP server - with separate sandbox environments maintained for integration testing with partner CBS systems. GitHub Actions–based CI/CD pipelines are being built out per service, enabling automated builds and deployments as each component matures. To improve ownership, versioning, and release independence, source code is being separated into dedicated repositories for the Middleware, Database services, and Application layers. An observability stack comprising Grafana, Prometheus, cAdvisor, and Node Exporter is planned to provide infrastructure and container-level monitoring.
Mobile Application
The iOS and Android wallet applications have been successfully implemented, built on React Native and incorporating multi-factor authentication. Alpha testing of the Android build (APK) is currently underway. For distribution via the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, we have applied for a D-U-N-S number; once it is issued, the applications will be published to both platforms.
NIFN Website
The NIFN website continues to be actively maintained, with ongoing updates to site content, developer-portal pages, meeting and circular archives, and banner media. Frontend visualisations have been advanced, with production integration pending completion of the final VPN and network setup. The website also hosts the AI-powered NIFN Knowledge Assistant, a bilingual (Nepali and English) RAG-based chatbot that answers user queries from NIFN's documentation.
Cooperative Outreach (Orientation Programs)
Five orientation programs completed - Kathmandu , Tokha, Lalitpur, Bhangaha (Mahottari), and Hetauda (Ward No. 2) - reaching ~140 cooperative participations. Each session covered NIFN's objectives, interoperability, secure digital transactions, and cybersecurity, and doubled as a feedback-gathering exercise on cooperatives' existing digital practices and challenges.
Communications and Marketing
Outreach to date has been primarily direct and in-person through the five orientation programs held across Kathmandu, Lalitpur, Tokha, Mahottari, and Hetauda, rather than broad public channels.
Along with outreaching and pitching our project to public officials and different cooperative unions.
Since, we are on pilot phase of our project so marketing like social media are in-scope. Once, we are live then we are going to prioritize our social media marketing.
We are planning to formalize public-facing communications (blog write-ups, session recaps, and technical updates) as the platform approaches wider release.
What's Next?
For the remainder of the funded grant period, the team is prioritizing:
- Providing orientation and digital financial training to different cooperatives and BFIs.
- Completing and validating Planet Earth and Channakya CBS integrations, including full environment testing.
- Readiness for User Acceptance Testing(UAT) ongoing.
- Continued performance engineering - standardized and long-running load tests, database scalability testing, and bottleneck remediation.
- Completing authentication and security hardening across UI, middleware, and database layers.
- Expanding automation test coverage and formalizing regression/release-gate practices.
- Progressing the iOS/mobile wallet app from APK to the platform availability
- Strengthening production operations: CI/CD, monitoring, backups, recovery testing, and environment standardization.
- Building on the orientation programs with more detailed capacity-building and pilot cooperative onboarding, informed directly by the feedback and challenges surfaced during the previous sessions.
Relevant Links/Resources
NIFN website,
sandbox/demo links,
NIFN wallet,
NIFN operator
orientation program materials, etc.
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