Crunchfish: Enabling Offline Payments in an Online World — Practical Guides to Offline Payment

Despite all the recent attention on the topic of offline payments, there remains an unclear understanding in the market around the practical design choices and trade-offs for offline real-time payments and CBDCs. Crunchfish, a pioneer for offline payments,…

PASA: A South African Approach to Interoperability

South Africa is currently transitioning its regulatory landscape to support increased access to the National Payment System (NPS) and to adopt activity-based licensing and regulation for payment service providers. The Payments Association of South Africa…

Visa — Use Cases, Corridors, and Context: Digging Deeper to Improve Cross-border Payments

A closer look at how cross-border payment solutions are meeting end user needs can be invaluable in guiding the public and private sectors’ efforts to make meaningful improvements.

ProgressSoft: A Promising Path to Interoperable Cross-Border Payments

By leveraging emerging technologies, and availing infrastructure to seamlessly integrate with those technologies both at a bi-currency level (country-to-country) and at a multi-CBDC level or consortium of multiple countries, a foundation for a truly global…

Mojaloop: Achieving Financial Equity Across Asia and Africa Requires a Digital Approach to Financial Inclusion

Named after the Swahili word for “one,” the Mojaloop open-source software project was established in 2017 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to address the lack of guaranteed inclusiveness and interoperability within nations’ payment systems to allow…

G20 Roadmap for Enhanced Cross-Border Payments: What We Have Achieved Collectively and What is Next

Since the G20 roadmap was launched in autumn 2020, considerable progress has been achieved across 19 different building blocks (BBs). The authorities internationally have developed a strong understanding of the issues, taken stock of emerging solutions…

StoneX Global Payments: Navigating Our Ever-Changing Payment Landscape

While global regulators are rightly promoting the implementation of common standards, fast-developing geopolitical risks could lead to an increasingly fragmented ecosystem instead. This highlights the need for banks and financial services providers to…

Buna: Cross-border Payments Need Higher Ambition!

In my previous article in this publication a few months after the launch of Buna in 2020, I shared some thoughts on the challenges that cross-border payment systems must tackle to develop and progress. In the past two years, we have been onboarding new…

A Digital Dollar? Here’s How We Start

The Digital Dollar Project is a convener of ideas, people, and organizations to facilitate open experimentation and data collection for consideration. We have set out to explore the thesis that a tokenized U.S. dollar could provide societal and economic…

FIS: Advancing CBDC Network Interoperability and Integration

APIs can significantly accelerate the pace of product and infrastructure development, as well as the integration of various payment systems. The FIS CBDC & Digital Currencies Connected Ecosystem™ can also accelerate delivery of the prototypes, allowing…