Brief Project Description
People's Clearinghouse (PCH) is a digital payments platform designed to interconnect community banks and savings cooperatives in Mexico, among themselves, with the national financial system, and with international networks for account-deposited remittances. Built on the basis of open-source technology (Rafiki, Mojaloop, ILP), PCH is led by the Mexican Association of Social Sector Credit Unions (AMUCSS), an organization with four decades of experience building community-owned financial institutions in rural and indigenous regions. By routing remittances directly into community bank accounts rather than into cash, PCH aims to create a virtuous cycle: more local capital, more credit for productive projects, less inequality, and less forced migration.
For context on our earlier milestones, read our Progress Report #1.
Project Update
The arc: January 2024 to March 2026
When we signed with the Interledger Foundation in January 2024, we had a clear idea, a strong team of social finance leaders, a fresh cohort of eight young developers recruited mainly from the Technological University of the Mixteca in Oaxaca, and a simple prototype of the Cross-Network Provider (CNP), the connector that translates Rafiki cross-border transfers into the PCH switch format that community banks would connect to. What we didn't have was a production system. Or a mobile app. Or real integrations with core banking software. Or a connection to SPEI, Mexico's national real-time payment network. Or a production-grade infrastructure. Those are the things we built over the following two years.
It was a longer path than we anticipated because we had to adapt all our platform to a very specific regulation set by the Central Bank. And also because as we went deeper into the communities, we realized the scope of what "real financial inclusion" actually demands. A clearinghouse that connects financial institutions is not enough. You also need the institutions' clients to have a way to interact with their accounts digitally. And for that you need a mobile application. And for that application to be useful (rather than immediately abandoned for cash) you need AML compliance, settlement reports, fees management, QR payments, push notifications, a PISP security architecture. Each of these components was built, tested, demoed, and refined.
The grant was extended to support the final sprint toward a fully operational platform: SPEI integration, core banking system integrations, production deployment, and the live demo at the 2025 Interledger Summit in Mexico City.
The capstone: the live demo at ILF Summit 2025
The Interledger Summit in November 2025, held in the heart of Mexico City, was the moment everything came together. We presented on the main stage in front of an international audience, and then, live, we ran intra-clearinghouse and CNP-to-clearinghouse transactions.
We showed a Rafiki remittance launched from the ILF test wallet. Within milliseconds, the phone lit up: 223 Mexican pesos received, with a push notification showing the sender, the amount, the transaction ID, and a QR shareable receipt. Then we switched to the PCH mobile app and did a P2P transfer between two accounts on the switch (scanning QR code and with an instant audio notification). Then a merchant scenario: request-to-pay, pre-filled amount, biometric confirmation, instant settlement. Right after the demo, the audience of 200+ people downloaded the PCH demo app and were paying community producers from Oaxaca, Pahuatlán, and elsewhere who had come to the Summit to sell their crafts, using virtual balances topped up with Rafiki remittances from the ILF and PCH teams.
Behind each of those transactions ran a real-time AML engine inspecting every transfer in under a second, a gRPC-based switch routing funds through a modular bounded-context architecture, a PISP layer securing the mobile connection with public-key cryptography, and a compliance dashboard generating regulatory PDF reports with one click (the same reports that may have taken a money transmitter hours to produce manually).
The presentation also included a reference to a future development: a working offline payments prototype. Along many visits to rural communities we had realized that the internet is very unstable and that a successful digital payments network that impacts these regions requires new forms of connectivity.
The presentation closed with the entire PCH development team standing on the main stage in front of their work. Most of them had never imagined being there when they started their training on Rafiki and Mojaloop two years earlier in Oaxaca.
A reflection: from clearinghouse to full digital ecosystem
One thing changed significantly over the grant period, and it's worth being honest about it: our conception of what PCH needs to be.
We started with a clearinghouse: a technical infrastructure for routing transfers between financial institutions. That remains the core. But through community visits to places like Ejutla, San Pablito and Pahuatlán, we understood that connecting institutions is not the same as including people. If a community bank receives a real-time remittance but its clients still have to take a six-hour round trip to check their balance, nothing fundamental has changed in their lives. So we first built a Whatsapp payment bot solution, and then, after a series of discussions with the Central Bank, a mobile application so that the main payment channel would be entirely under our control. In building it, we had to build the PISP model (with its consent token architecture), all so that someone in a rural market could check their balance or pay for tortillas without touching a bank teller or having to take a bus.
This deeper scope is why the timeline extended, and we think it was worth every extra month.
Technical deliverables: completed
By March 2026, all four deliverables defined in the grant extension have been achieved:
- Rafiki/CNP cross-border scheme: complete. The CNP is fully production-ready: it handles ILP routing from a US-based Rafiki wallet to a Mexican community bank account, performs real-time AML inspection, manages FX rate integration, produces compliance reports, and exposes an operator admin portal for liquidity management and reconciliation. The CNP architecture has been refined since the first successful demo in August 2024, now including idempotency, error handling, and a complete transfer lifecycle model that keeps Rafiki and PCH in sync.
- Production deployment: complete. PCH's infrastructure runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on GCP, with managed services for databases (Cloud SQL, Firestore), messaging (managed Kafka), security (GCP KMS for certificate management), and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch/Kibana). CI/CD pipelines automate testing and deployment. Backups are retained according to Central Bank requirements. The environment was stress-tested with 200+ simultaneous users during the ILF Summit demo before being hardened into the current production configuration. A walkthrough of the production environment is available.
- SPEI integration: complete. PCH can now send transfers to any account in Mexico's national financial system. The integration uses a Hermes, deployed in PCH's own environment, which is a SPEI gateway provided by Conecta, one of the main SPEI specialists in the country. When a user sends money to a phone number that doesn't belong to a PCH participant, the switch automatically looks up the recipient's CLABE through a Central Bank service and routes the transfer through SPEI. From the user's perspective, the experience is identical to an internal transfer. A demo of this integration is available.
- Core banking system integrations: complete. Two CBS integrations are now production-ready. Mifos, an open-source core banking system with broad adoption among social financial institutions, was the first to be fully integrated, with a reusable gRPC client library published in a public GitHub repository. This effort was possible through the invaluable work of Fintecheando, a main tech actor in the Mexican fintech ecosystem. The integration was showcased at the Interledger Summit 2025. Sinefi, a core banking system used by approximately 25 financial entities serving around one million clients in Mexico, was integrated second, with its CEO participating in the final integration demo. Both systems authenticate to the PCH switch using certificate-based mutual TLS, follow the same gRPC synchronous connection protocol, and can perform lookups and fund transfers in real time. The expertise acquired in the process means that onboarding additional CBS providers now requires far less custom development. Demos of the Mifos integration and the Sinefi integration are available.
Authorization process: at the threshold
The Central Bank authorization process has been one of the longer threads of this journey, and one that has required us to stay close and responsive to regulatory feedback at every stage. The good news is that every required element is now in place: the switch software meets all regulatory requirements, the operational documentation and compliance manuals have been updated to reflect the final architecture, and the formal submission package is complete. We are, genuinely, at the threshold of a new phase. Our expectation is that PCH will receive its clearinghouse authorization and be ready for launch by the summer of 2026.
When that happens, our intention is to reach several hundred thousand customers through our partner financial institutions (AMUCSS' network of 140 community banks, four of Mexico's five largest savings cooperatives, and Sinefi's network of 25 financial entities) before the end of the year. For most of those customers, it will be the first time they have had access to digital payments, real-time transfers, and account-deposited remittances. That is the moment the entire project has been building toward.
Project Impact & Target Audience(s)
PCH exists because certain communities have always been left out of the equation, not by accident, but by design. National banking systems optimize for scale and profitability. Rural communities, indigenous regions, and the migrants who send money back to them don't fit that model. PCH is built specifically for them.
The communities and their financial institutions
The most direct beneficiaries are the members of the social financial institutions that PCH connects: AMUCSS' network of 140 community banks, four of Mexico's five largest savings cooperatives, and Sinefi's network of 25 financial entities. Together, these institutions serve several million individual account holders in rural, semi-rural, and peri-urban regions across Mexico, predominantly in areas where commercial banks are absent or inaccessible. In the near term, these are the people PCH will serve at launch.
Looking further, the social financial sector as a whole (savings cooperatives, community banks, and social-purpose financial institutions) counts some 17 million users across Mexico. PCH is built to serve all of them over time, as a sector-wide shared infrastructure rather than a product for any single institution.
Two thirds of AMUCSS' users are women. Many are speakers of indigenous languages (Zapotec, Mixtec, Nahuatl, and others) in communities where cultural and linguistic barriers compound the financial ones. Many are the wives, mothers, and daughters of migrants working in the United States, managing household economies that depend on remittances arriving in cash, at significant cost and risk. For them, the difference between a cash remittance and an account-deposited one is not a technical detail. It is the difference between money that arrives safely, is captured by a local institution that can lend it back productively, and multiplies, versus money that arrives in an envelope, gets spent immediately, and leaves no trace in the formal financial system.
PCH's design reflects these realities. The platform already supports multilingual interfaces and at launch will include indigenous-languages. The mobile application is designed for low-connectivity environments (because a payment platform that only works on a strong LTE signal is not a platform for Oaxaca's mountains or Puebla's high valleys). The switch connection protocol was engineered for resilience on unstable internet lines, with automatic reconnection, because many community bank branches operate on basic subscriber lines that go down. And the offline payments prototype will be developed too, aimed squarely at communities where the internet does not reach at all.
The migrants
On the other side of the transfer flow are the millions of Mexican migrants living and working in the United States, the largest remittance corridor in the world, with over $60 billion USD sent annually. Today, most of those transfers arrive as cash, delivered through agents, at fees that eat into money that families need. PCH's CNP offers a path toward account-to-account remittances via Rafiki, directly into the recipient's community bank or savings cooperative. The Mexican migrant in the US can use a Rafiki-compatible wallet. Their family in Oaxaca or Hidalgo receives the funds in their account, in seconds. No cash agent. No distance-based fee. No trip to town.
This is not a marginal improvement. It is a structural change in how remittances work and in what they can do for the communities that depend on them.
The developers
One impact of this project that is easy to overlook, but worth naming, is what happened to the team that built it. Eight young developers were recruited from local Oaxaca universities in indigenous regions through a rigorous selection process that prioritized strong coding skills, English proficiency, and genuine commitment to social justice. Most of them had no prior exposure to ILP, Mojaloop, or Rafiki. Over two years, they became the heart of the project. They even contributed pull requests to the Rafiki repository. They debugged the vNext Mojaloop switch alongside its original architects. They presented their work at international summits in Cape Town, Cluj and Mexico City. They stood on the main stage at the 2025 Interledger Summit in front of an audience from around the world.
We believe this matters: not just as a feel-good story, but as a model. An innovative fintech ecosystem does not need to be built only in San Francisco or London or Singapore. It can be built in Oaxaca, by people who have a direct stake in the communities the technology is meant to serve.
Alignment with the Interledger Foundation's mission
PCH is the ILF mission made concrete. It is built on the basis of open standards and open-source software to move value across networks that previously could not communicate. It prioritizes the populations most excluded from existing financial systems. And it demonstrates that ILP-based technology is not only viable for global finance: it is specifically well-suited for the places global finance has forgotten. The communities that will benefit from PCH are exactly those the ILF exists to reach: women, indigenous communities, rural populations, migrants, and the institutions that have chosen to serve them for decades, without waiting for the market to catch up.
Progress on Objectives, Key Activities
The CNP: Rafiki-to-PCH bridge
The Cross-Network Provider was PCH's original technical bet: the idea that a single entity could sit between the Interledger network and a Mojaloop-based clearinghouse, translating the language of one into the language of the other. By the summer of 2024, the CNP was working: a Rafiki transfer initiated from a US-based wallet could reach a community bank account in Mexico, end to end, passing through the CNP and the PCH switch. We demonstrated this live at the Oaxaca Workweek in August 2024 and again at the Interledger Summit in Cape Town in October 2024 (the first public proof that this kind of cross-network bridge was not only theoretically sound but practically buildable).
Since then, the CNP has grown considerably. The core architecture remains: Rafiki on the Mexican side receives the ILP transfer, the CNP backend processes it, the PCH switch routes it to the right participant, and the community bank credits the recipient's account. The CNP also handles real-time FX rate queries, idempotency logic to prevent duplicate transfers, a complete error-handling model that keeps Rafiki and the switch in sync even when things go wrong on one side, an operator admin portal with liquidity dashboards and reconciliation tools, and automated compliance reports that previously required hours of manual work. What was a working prototype in 2024 is now a production-ready system.
The switch: building on Mojaloop
The PCH switch — the clearinghouse hub that routes transfers between participants, manages the position ledger, and handles settlement — is built on Mojaloop vNext, the next-generation version of the Mojaloop open-source payment switch. The decision to use Mojaloop was one of the best we made: it gave us a mature codebase, detailed technical documentation, an active global community, and direct access to the people who built it. The support we received from so many people and organizations familiar with Mojaloop vNext has been foundational.
We took the Mojaloop vNext switch and adapted it significantly for PCH's specific regulatory and operational context. Settlement logic, fees management, and compliance reporting were either absent or insufficient in the open-source version: not because Mojaloop neglected them, but because they depend on the specifics of each jurisdiction's financial regulation. We built them for Mexico, for the Central Bank requirements, and for the practical realities of small financial institutions. We also introduced a synchronous gRPC connection model that allows community banks to connect to the switch without implementing a full asynchronous message queue (a practical necessity given the technical resources available at these institutions). We also took advantage of the switch's architecture around bounded contexts, making the codebase modular enough to evolve quickly without breaking existing functionality.
Core banking system integrations
Connecting the PCH switch to a core banking system (CBS), the software that a community bank or savings cooperative uses to manage accounts, transactions, and clients, is the step that makes the platform real for participants. Without it, the switch has nowhere to route funds.
PCH uses gRPC as its integration protocol: a high-performance, contract-based remote procedure call framework developed by Google that uses Protocol Buffers for serialization. It is fast, secure, and built for bidirectional streaming. As such, it seems a good solution for a payment switch that needs persistent connections with participants. The challenge is that gRPC is essentially unknown in the Mexican financial sector. Every integration has had to begin from scratch: explaining the protocol, walking technical teams through the connection model, explaining client libraries, debugging certificate-based authentication flows, and running joint tests before the first successful lookup could be made.
That investment is now paying off. Mifos (an open-source CBS with broad adoption among social financial institutions globally) was the first to be fully integrated, with a reusable TypeScript gRPC client library published in a public repository. Fintecheando, a key partner in the Mexican fintech ecosystem with deep Mifos expertise, was essential to making this integration happen. Sinefi, a proprietary CBS used by approximately 25 Mexican financial entities serving roughly one million clients, was integrated second, with Sinefi's CEO participating directly in the final demo and validating the result.
SPEI integration: connecting to Mexico's national payment network
SPEI, Mexico's real-time gross settlement system, operated by the Central Bank, is the backbone of the country's financial system. Any payment that needs to reach a bank account outside the PCH network has to go through SPEI. Getting there required not only a technical integration but a careful architectural design, because SPEI is an RTGS system (settling each transaction individually and in real time) while PCH operates as a net settlement platform, a fundamental difference with regulatory and operational consequences that took months of analysis and design sessions to resolve properly.
The integration was made possible through close collaboration with Conecta, one of Mexico's leading SPEI specialists and the provider of Hermes, the SPEI integration platform deployed in PCH's own environment. Conecta's team held weekly sessions with PCH's developers throughout the integration process, clarifying SPEI's operational logic, validating the transfer flows, and helping navigate the certification requirements. Their knowledge saved PCH an enormous amount of time that would otherwise have been spent reverse-engineering a regulatory system from documentation alone.
The result: when a PCH participant's client sends money to a phone number that doesn't belong to a PCH participant, the switch queries the Central Bank’s CLABE registry to retrieve the recipient's bank account identifier, formats the request according to SPEI's specifications, routes it through Hermes, and receives a webhook confirmation from the Central Bank when settlement is complete. From the sender's perspective, it looks exactly like any other transfer. Behind the scenes, it reaches any bank account in Mexico.
Production environment: built for the Central Bank
The infrastructure that runs PCH is not the same infrastructure that ran the 2024 demo. After the November 2025 ILF Summit, which stress-tested the system with over 200 simultaneous users in a live public setting, the team spent three months rebuilding the environment from the ground up according to Central Bank requirements and Kubernetes production best practices.
The current production environment runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on GCP, with managed services for all critical components: Cloud SQL and Firestore for databases, managed Kafka for messaging, GCP Key Management Service for certificate creation and storage, and a dedicated observability cluster running Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, and Kibana. CI/CD pipelines automate building, testing, and security scanning end to end (a code change triggers a build, a security scan, a deployment, and a Slack notification); deployment to the production environment includes a manual approval gate as required by security policy. Backups are generated daily and retained on a schedule that meets the Central Bank's specific archiving requirements. Pod security policies enforce least-privilege principles throughout the cluster.
Every architectural decision has been made with the authorization audit in mind. The documentation that accompanies the technical build is as complete as the system itself.
Mobile app and PISP: banking for institutions without apps
The majority of community banks and savings cooperatives in Mexico do not have a mobile banking application. Building one is expensive for a small financial entity, requires technical teams they don't have, and requires regulatory approvals they'd need years to obtain. PCH's mobile app solves this problem simply: it connects not to the bank but to the PCH switch, which connects to the bank. Any institution that joins the PCH network gets a branded mobile banking experience for its clients on day one, without writing a line of code.
The security architecture behind this is called the PISP model (Payment Initiation Service Provider). When a client onboards to the app, a cryptographic key pair is generated on their device. A consent token issued by the community bank, signed and stored by the switch, governs exactly what the app can do on the client's behalf: which accounts are accessible, whether transfers can be initiated, and under what conditions. The bank retains full control. The client has full transparency. The switch is the trusted intermediary.
The current app supports balance checks, P2P transfers by phone number, QR-code payments, request-to-pay flows, and real-time push notifications with audio alerts, useful in market settings where someone is handling goods rather than watching a screen. It is not yet as polished as the mobile apps of Mexico's major commercial banks. But it works, it is secure, and it gives institutions and their clients a foundation to build on. We will continue developing it until it is.
AML: real-time compliance as a shared service
Anti-money laundering compliance is one of the heaviest operational burdens for small financial institutions. Mexico's financial regulator (CNBV) requires AML validation in real time for every transaction. Most community banks and savings cooperatives lack the technical infrastructure to do this, and even if they had it, building and maintaining a real-time AML engine is a significant and ongoing investment.
PCH's AML engine solves this as a shared service. When a transfer enters the network, particularly a cross-border remittance arriving via the CNP, the AML module intercepts it before it reaches the recipient's institution. It queries the client's profile in an AML database, checks against official blocked-persons lists, evaluates the transfer against the client's historical transaction pattern, and assigns a risk score. The whole process runs in under a second. If the transfer passes, it proceeds. If it's flagged, it's held for review.
The key innovation here is that the CNP can perform all these validations itself, using the party data it has already gathered during the lookup phase of the transfer. The community bank does not have to do anything. This is especially significant for remittances, which are the highest-risk transfer type from a regulatory perspective and the ones that community banks were least equipped to handle compliantly on their own.
Settlement, fees, and reporting
Settlement, fees, and compliance reporting tend to be underestimated in fintech projects and overdue in production. They are also the ones that regulators care about most.
In the Mojaloop vNext open-source base, settlement logic exists but is not calibrated for Mexico's regulatory framework, fee management is non-existent, and reporting is not designed for the specific formats and periodicities required by the Central Bank. PCH built all three from scratch, aligned with the specific requirements of the authorization process. Settlement reports are generated automatically. Fee calculations are configurable per participant and per transaction type. Compliance reports can be produced with a single click, in the formats required by Mexican financial regulators. These are not glamorous features, but without them the platform cannot legally operate. They are done.
Documentation and regulatory submission
The process of building a clearinghouse in Mexico requires submitting to the Central Bank a complete package of technical documentation, operational manuals, compliance procedures, risk frameworks, and internal norms, all of which must reflect the final, production-ready state of the system. For most of the grant period, the documentation process ran in parallel with the development process, which meant that every time the architecture evolved, the documents had to evolve too.
That cycle is now complete. The switch software meets all regulatory requirements. Every component of the operational documentation has been updated to reflect the current architecture. The formal submission package is ready. We expect to submit it imminently and to receive authorization in the summer of 2026.
Key social and collaborative activities
The technical work was never the whole story. Over the course of the grant, PCH was part of an extraordinary set of collaborative moments, some that shaped the technical direction of the project, others that expanded its human and institutional reach. Here are the main ones.
Oaxaca Work Week, August 2024
In the second week of August 2024, a team of five from the Interledger Foundation joined 20 PCH developers and collaborators for a full work week at a coworking space in Oaxaca City. It was the first time the two teams had worked in the same room. The week began with PCH's first major live demo: a complete end-to-end remittance from a US test wallet, through the CNP and the PCH switch, arriving at an account in a Mexican community bank. The ILF team was impressed.
The rest of the week was spent in deep technical sessions on the CNP's outstanding requirements, the settlement model, the SPEI integration architecture (with Conecta and Sinefi representatives present), and production deployment planning. On the third day, the entire group celebrated with a traditional Oaxacan calenda (a brass-band street parade with giant papier-mâché puppets) that wound through the streets of Oaxaca City, picking up curious locals along the way. On the fourth day, the group visited three community banks in the Oaxaca region: the offices of Red Oaxaca (a network of microbanks serving families across the greater Oaxaca area), a visit to Acreimex (a savings cooperative with 62 branches and 425,000 account holders), and a trip to Ejutla, a rural town an hour and a half away, where the team saw what day-to-day banking looks like for people in a small community (including what happens when the internet goes down). They also visited a mezcalero (an artisanal mezcal producer), whose business expansion was being financed by a Red Oaxaca microloan. The week closed with a clear shared roadmap toward the Cape Town Summit.
Rafiki Work Week, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, August 2024
Four PCH developers attended the Rafiki Work Week organized by the ILF at BreakPoint IT's offices in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a gathering that brought together 20+ engineers from Rafiki, GateHub, JoPACC, and PCH. The PCH team worked directly with ILF's engineering and technical writing teams on outstanding Rafiki integration requirements, including how to handle KYC data flows, how to manage transfer status updates, and how to improve the deployment documentation for Rafiki integrators. Several of PCH's real-world deployment challenges directly informed improvements to Rafiki's official documentation. PCH developers also had pull requests merged into the Rafiki repository during the week.
Interledger Summit 2024, Cape Town, South Africa
At the annual Interledger Summit in Cape Town in October 2024, PCH presented on the main stage for the first time to a global audience. The presentation covered the social and economic rationale for the project: the Dutch disease paradox of remittances, the untapped potential of community banks, and the role of ILP in connecting them, and closed with a live demo. A transfer was initiated from the ILF test wallet using a phone-number-based wallet address, routed through the CNP and the PCH switch, and confirmed as received at a community bank account. The CNP dashboard showed the transaction in real time. A compliance report was generated with one click. A WhatsApp notification arrived at the recipient's phone. The audience, including Interledger community members from around the world, saw for the first time that this model was not theoretical: it was running code.
Payments Canada Summit panel, Toronto, February 2025
PCH participated in an Interledger Foundation panel at the Payments Canada Summit in Toronto, bringing the project's perspective to one of the most important payments industry forums in Canada. The panel addressed cross-border payments innovation, the US-Mexico remittance corridor, and the potential of innovative fintech to serve populations that commercial payment systems have not reached. It was an opportunity to speak directly to the North American financial sector about what PCH is building and why.
Rafiki Work Week, Cluj, Romania, July 2025
PCH was again represented at the Rafiki Work Week in July 2025, now held in the broader Transylvania region and gathering 38 participants from 8+ organizations. The week focused on Rafiki's next architectural evolution: a full event-driven redesign for horizontal scalability, new Open Payments documentation in multiple languages (including Spanish), a Kubernetes Operator for simplified deployment, card and POS integrations, and a Payment Pointer to SEPA flow. PCH's team participated across workstreams, contributing to the ongoing alignment between Rafiki's roadmap and PCH's production requirements.
Oaxaca Work Week, 2025
A second Oaxaca Work Week was organized in 2025 at La Clínica, a space in the heart of Oaxaca City that became PCH's workshop home for the week. The gathering brought together PCH's full development team alongside ILF engineers and partners for an intensive five-day sprint. The week featured demos of the consumer mobile app, the admin portal, the DevOps pipelines, the Kubernetes operator, and the CBS integrations; technical workstreams on PISP/3PPI, the Rafiki integration, settlement, performance, and scalability; and in-depth planning for the production environment and the November Summit demo. It was the most complete convening of the PCH and ILF teams to date and the last major collaborative technical sprint before the platform went into final production hardening.
Mexico Student Hackathons, September 2025
In September 2025, the Interledger Foundation organized four university hackathons across Mexico (in Oaxaca, the State of Mexico, Aguascalientes, and Mexico City) with PCH's active participation, both in organizing and tutoring during the hackathons. Over 500 students from 40+ higher education institutions explored solutions using the Open Payments API, from remittance tools to agricultural payment platforms to accessible transport systems. The Oaxaca hackathon was held at UABJO (the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca). Students from the Technological University of the Mixteca (PCH devs’ main alma mater) participated alongside students from eight other institutions.
Mumbai Fintech Fest, October 2025
People’s Clearinghouse participated in the largest fintech festival in the world alongside representatives of CECOBAN (an important clearinghouse in Mexico) and Interledger Foundation, to present its platform in a cross-border panel in front of an audience of 200 people. The visit included a private full day of analysis and discussions at the headquarters of the National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI) in order to understand how India’s national RTGS and the country's financial inclusion strategy work. It also included invaluable discussions at the HQ of the amazing Savatra Technologies team, responsible for 80% of UPI integrations in India, and a key model for what PCH aspires to become.
Pahuatlán Workshop, October 2025
In preparation for the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the ILF's Summit Program Committee organized an immersion workshop in Pahuatlán, a mountainous community in Puebla known for its centuries-old Amate paper craft. The workshop brought together technologists, grant makers, community builders, and open-source advocates alongside AMUCSS community bankers and local artisans. The group learned about the financial realities of rural communities: the cooperative savings systems, the harvest-season loans, the three-hour round trips to check a bank balance, the predatory lenders who fill the gaps at rates exceeding 500%. We discussed how open payment infrastructure can be designed around these realities rather than in spite of them. The experience directly shaped both the agenda of the Mexico City Summit and PCH's own thinking about what the mobile application needed to provide.
Interledger Summit 2025, Mexico City
The Interledger Foundation chose Mexico City for its 2025 Summit. PCH presented on the main stage to an audience that had already seen the documentary film about PCH before the session began (more on that below). The presentation covered the evolution of the platform from clearinghouse to full digital ecosystem, with a particular focus on why that evolution was necessary, not as a technical decision, but as a social one. Live demos showed the complete transfer flow: Rafiki remittance arriving with a push notification, P2P transfer by QR code, merchant payment with audio notification, and the PCH admin dashboard confirming every transaction in real time. Isabel Cruz, AMUCSS' Executive Director, closed the session by presenting the producers and speaking about 40 years of community finance work: the human story behind every line of code.
Communications and Marketing
International press coverage
PCH's story has reached audiences well beyond the Interledger community. A coordinated press effort, developed in partnership with the ILF communications team, resulted in coverage in some of the most respected outlets in global finance and fintech.
The Banker covered the US-Mexico corridor angle in depth. PaymentsJournal explored the cross-border payments dimension. Finextra focused on the community banking angle. The Paypers covered the ILF partnership announcement. Fintech Finance News and Citybiz reported on the project's launch. The Global Treasurer covered the remittances angle, and Financial IT also published pieces on the project.
PCH has deliberately kept a relatively low public profile in Mexico itself while the Central Bank authorization process is ongoing: a deliberate choice to ensure the regulatory conversation remains fluid and direct, without external noise. Once authorized, that changes.
"The People's Code", a documentary film
In September 2025, a documentary film about PCH premiered at Cine Tonalá in Mexico City: The People's Code, produced independently by a Mexican production company with Interledger support.
The film matters for reasons that go beyond press coverage. A project like PCH lives at the intersection of social history, economic theory, indigenous communities, open-source software, and financial regulation: a combination that is almost impossible to communicate in a press release or a conference slide. The documentary does something different: it shows what this work actually looks like from the inside. It shows Isabel Cruz and AMUCSS' community bankers in the field, their relationships with communities that have been organizing their own finances for decades without external validation. It shows the developers in Oaxaca: young people from indigenous regions building fintech infrastructure that most of the global financial world has never heard of. It shows the farmers and artisans who are the reason any of this matters. And it shows the friction, the uncertainty, and the slow accumulation of trust that a project of this kind actually requires.
We believe that a social-technological project that cannot explain itself in human terms is a project with a communication problem and possibly a mission problem. The People's Code is our evidence that PCH has neither. It is a record of the "behind the cameras" of building technology for a purpose, and of the communities that gave us the reason to build it.
"The Missing Link": academic paper on remittances and development
In September 2025, PCH co-authored a major academic and policy paper alongside Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda (UCLA), Isabel Cruz Hernández (AMUCSS), and Yvonne Su (Oxford): The Missing Link: Remittances & Socially Trusted Financial Intermediation as Key Elements for Addressing Root Causes of Migration.
The paper makes a rigorous empirical case for something PCH has always argued intuitively: that cash remittances, in the absence of proper financial intermediation, do not foster regional development: they often undermine it. Drawing on data from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the authors document what they call the "vicious cycle of remittances": cash inflows into communities without productive infrastructure cause localized inflation, reduce competitiveness, and paradoxically deepen economic dependence on migration. Remittances growing at 165% in Mexico over the past decade (now exceeding $60 billion annually, far outpacing foreign direct investment) while rural communities remain structurally underdeveloped is not a paradox. It is a predictable consequence of the wrong delivery model.
The paper then describes the "virtuous cycle": what happens when remittances arrive into community-owned financial institutions that can convert them into savings, credit, and local investment. Employment grows. Productive projects are funded. Economic dependence on migration decreases. The authors document that this model already exists, partially, in the network of savings cooperatives and community banks that AMUCSS and its peers have been building for four decades. What has been missing is the fintech infrastructure to make it work at scale, which is exactly what PCH is building.
The paper closes with six concrete policy recommendations across regulatory, technological, and social dimensions, and includes a textbox specifically describing PCH and the Interledger Protocol as a working implementation of the virtuous cycle framework.
The paper was distributed as a designed, printed booklet at fintech events in Mexico and India, reaching several hundreds of practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. It was also published digitally and shared through ILF channels. It is, we believe, the most complete intellectual articulation of why PCH exists, and one that places it within a broader conversation about migration policy, development finance, and the responsibilities of technological innovation.
Broader outreach: Toronto, India, and beyond
Communications and marketing, for a project like PCH, are never just about getting our name in the press. They are also about listening to other regions, other systems, other approaches to problems that look like ours from a distance and turn out, up close, to be both different and illuminating.
The panel at the Payments Canada Summit in Toronto was a case in point: speaking to practitioners from one of the world's most regulated and sophisticated payment ecosystems about why fintech infrastructure for isolated areas matters for countries generated conversations we wouldn't have had otherwise about regulatory philosophy, about what "inclusion" means to people who design systems from the top down rather than from the community up, and about the potential of the US-Mexico corridor for the North American financial sector. Also, remittances are not a Mexican problem: the vicious cycle of cash remittances is a global pattern. And the policy recommendations that emerge from studying Mexico apply, with adaptation, to corridors across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central America. Sharing PCH's work in those contexts has helped us understand which parts of our model are genuinely transferable and which are specific to Mexico's regulatory and social landscape.
What’s Next?
Authorization and launch
The most important milestone ahead is the one we've been working toward since January 2024: Central Bank authorization. The documentation package is complete, the software meets all regulatory requirements, and we expect to submit the final version to the Central Bank imminently. Our expectation is that PCH will be authorized and ready for commercial launch by the summer of 2026.
Cross-border operations: finding the right partners
With the CNP production-ready and the Rafiki scheme complete, the cross-border layer of PCH is technically operational. What comes next is building the commercial and institutional relationships that will make it real. Starting this summer, we will be actively seeking new partners on the US side: financial institutions, money transmitters, and Rafiki-compatible wallets that want to participate in a genuinely different remittance model. We have been in contact with MiPlata, a fellow ILF grantee with a growing presence in the US-Mexico corridor, and see great potential in this collaboration, not as a commercial arrangement alone, but as a shared contribution to the communities both projects are committed to serving.
Commercial rollout: a fieldwork process
Launching a digital payments platform is not the same as delivering it. The community banks and savings cooperatives that will join the PCH network are institutions with deep roots in the communities they serve, and many of those communities have had little or no exposure to digital financial tools. We cannot release an application, send a press announcement, and assume adoption will follow.
What we are beginning instead is a much more deliberate process: conversations with the representatives of partner institutions, but also with community leaders, with the people who use those banks and cooperatives every day, and with the local organizations that have been building trust in those communities for decades. We are designing training strategies and community support models that account for the reality that someone receiving their first digital remittance may never have interacted with a financial app before. We are planning field visits, pilot programs, and feedback loops that will shape how the platform is introduced and how it evolves after introduction.
Offline payments
A meaningful portion of the communities PCH aims to serve have unreliable or no internet access. We believe that digital financial inclusion in those communities requires a payments model that does not depend on a continuous connection, one in which transactions can be initiated and confirmed locally, then cleared to the network when connectivity is restored. We are committed to developing this capability, because without it, the platform's reach has a ceiling that we are not willing to accept.
Community Support
We have been fortunate to build PCH surrounded by a community that has been generous with its time, expertise, and belief in what we are doing. We would like that community to continue growing, and there are specific areas where new collaborations could make a real difference.
The most immediate need is on the cross-border side. If you are working in remittances, as a money transmitter, a Rafiki implementor, a wallet provider, or a fintech operating in the US-Mexico corridor or similar corridors, we want to talk. PCH's CNP is ready to connect to the right partners. MiPlata has been a promising point of contact, and we are eager to expand that circle. Every new Rafiki-compatible entity that connects to our network extends the reach of the platform directly into the communities waiting for it.
Beyond remittances, we are always interested in connecting with organizations working on financial inclusion in rural and indigenous contexts, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. The problems PCH is solving are not unique to Mexico, and the solutions we are building are designed to be adaptable. If you see a parallel between your context and ours, we would genuinely like to hear from you.
Finally: if you know policymakers, regulators, or researchers working on migration, development finance, or remittances policy who should know about The Missing Link paper and the model it describes, please share it. The academic and policy case for what PCH is doing needs to reach people who can act on it, not just people who already agree with it.
Additional Comments
We want to close this report with gratitude. The Interledger Foundation has been far more than a funder to PCH. The ILF team — its grant program team, its engineers, its communications colleagues — has been present at every stage of this journey: in Oaxaca, in Cape Town, in Cluj, in Pahuatlán, in Mexico City, and in countless calls across time zones in between. The patience, the technical depth, and the genuine care for the mission that characterize the ILF staff have made an enormous difference to what PCH became. We thank them sincerely.
We also want to acknowledge the extraordinary network of people and organizations who contributed to this work in ways that don't appear in grant reports but are indispensable to how projects like this actually get built. The Mojaloop Foundation and its community, particularly those who gave generously of their time to support our work on the switch. ThitsaWorks, whose Mojaloop expertise was essential in the early phases. Fintecheando, whose knowledge of the Mexican fintech ecosystem and commitment to open-source collaboration was invaluable. Conecta, for their patience and expertise in walking us through SPEI. Sinefi's team, for embracing a new integration model in an environment where gRPC was entirely unfamiliar. The team at Breakpoint IT in Cluj, for twice hosting us with warmth and excellent coffee. And the many others (developers, advisors, community leaders, artisans, mezcaleros, and bank tellers) who shared their knowledge, their time, and their lives with us over these two years.
Most of all: to the development team in Oaxaca, who built this. You know who you are, and you know what you did. The communities this platform will serve are lucky to have had you building for them. We are not done. We are just getting to a new stage.
Top comments (0)