 Hello, everyone. Welcome to this advancing financial inclusion to open source payment model session. My name is Costa Perry, I will be co-presenting, co-presenting with Paula Ponder, I follow. I am, as I said, Costa Perry, the modular foundation chair of the board. I also am deputy director at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the financial services for the poor strategy. So, let's dive in. In this question first, do you know how people who are unbanked and who typically earn less than $2 on average per day? So here is a symbol that represents their lives. Because basically, they need to walk all day to pay for things. It is expensive to be poor because if you only have cash to view for your transactions, then essentially you are required to work, to walk, to pay for the tuition of your child at school, to pay for your utility bill, to bring money to another family member in another village who needs the money. So you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you lose time, energy in just dealing with cash and having to deal all day with cash for your financial transactions. Today, there are still 1.7 billion people on the planet in this situation. 400 million Africans on the African continent are in this situation. And the situation also is skewed with a big gender gap. There are more women in this case than there are men overall, from 60 to even 70%. So 10 to 20% gender gap sometimes. So digital financial inclusion is essentially about connecting this population to an adequate digital financial system through their mobile phones. And the instrument for that actually was invented 10 years ago already. The first innovation happened in Kenya 10 years ago, in fact more than 10 years ago, with the system called M-Pesa. That system essentially allowed people to send money using very simple mobile phones, not smart phones, to send money to each other pretty much in the same way they send text messages. And this system that was provided not by a bank, but by a telco company, has proven immensely useful for people in households that were unbanked and that dealt only with cash. So it is an instrument of poverty alleviation in the sense that when the people get connected to a financial system, they have a way to save money. They can better manage their money. They can better manage their lives and not walk all the time anymore. Another thing that M-Pesa has proven is that it can be profitable to actually serve this poor segment of the population with a totally different business model than traditional banks. By 2018 then, this is a situation that they were in excess of 150, and today actually more than 200 mobile money operations across Africa, as well in South Asia. And you can see here some of the statistics, but it is for example impressive that in Kenya, 68% of adults, even more today, use mobile money daily. And you can see some other impressive numbers showing again how digital technology can serve in connecting and increasing financial increases. So then we are there today. As I mentioned, there are still 1.7 billion people. We came down at the beginning of the last decade from 2.5 billion people. So progress has been made, but there is still a huge population out there that we need to connect and we essentially need to accelerate the movement considerably. So a new wave of innovation needs to happen, and that wave actually happened in Tanzania. And in one word it's about interoperability of these mobile money services. One of the issues with, as good as I showed you, the mobile money was, for many perspectives, one of the issue that remains is that the majority of the mobile money operations are siloed in the sense that the standard and receiver of the payment need to be on the same network. So if you think about this, if you had a phone where you could talk to people only on the same network as you, would be useful, but obviously not very pervasive. And so this next wave of interoperability happening in Tanzania when the four mobile money operations started interoperating. And what is happening, so that was a few years ago. Today, there is a program that is driven by the Tanzania Central Bank that will connect the whole country in an interoperable way, not only the mobile money operations, but also the traditional banks. And hence, a woman in Tanzania that has a mobile wallet on a mobile money operation now can reset and receive money between many, across all of these mobile money networks, but also from bankers, she can receive salary from a bank account, she can pay other people who have a bank account. So let's look at what actually does interoperability bring. Let me play this short video to show you what happened in Tanzania a few years ago. So you can see how interoperability actually enables this scaling that is needed and that I was talking about. And today, there is a project on the scale of the whole country, not only on the mobile money operators to have interoperability in a payment platform on a country scale and Moja loop as we will see is the technology that enables this. So, interoperability, as I said, is the next wave of innovation that will hopefully allow us to reduce the 1.7 billion people number. I hope to zero by the end of these decades by connecting systems together. And Moja loop was actually developed as an open source as a software that provides easily this interoperability between different systems, be it mobile money operations, be it even blockchain systems. So Moja loop has been developed as one of the key assets that will enable this acceleration, and hence accelerate financial inclusion. Before handing over to Paula, let me just tell you a little bit how these country wide programs work. Tanzania was a pioneer, as we say, but there are many other countries and regions in Africa and South Asia, who have also progressed. And typically there are these four layers that require attention rules raise accounts and applications rules are, as the name says everything that's required about setting up the right regulatory and governance framework. Because it is not because we deal and have services for the poor that there shouldn't be rules and regulations. On the contrary, we should protect this population even more against fraud, for example, so very important aspect rails is the actual infrastructure. And this is a collaborative space where Moja loop place where Moja loop is an enabler to provide essentially a shared country wide or even regional wide payment infrastructure that has the characteristics that Paula will talk about. Why is this important. It is important so that there is a rich ecosystem of accounts be mobile money wallets or traditional bank accounts are thriving on these rails, but even more importantly to connect new innovative applications to these rails that serve the population. For example, solar pay as you go transportation services, all the services that require vast amounts of small value payments. So that's the stage that I wanted to set for Moja loop and I will now hand over to Paula, who can explain how Moja loop enables this economy that is open where everyone benefits from an economy that includes everyone. Paula, please. Thank you Costa. I'll switch over to my deck. Okay, so thank you everyone for joining us today. I want to talk a little bit more about the Moja loop project and the Moja loop foundation and how we can address the issue of financial inclusion that Costa has given you some insights on. But first of all, as as Costa mentioned Moja loop is an open source software stack. It's designed to enable interoperability across payment service providers. So this was a fundamental decision made in how we address financial inclusion is to leverage the benefits of the open source development model to deliver this functionality to the marketplace. The design of Moja loop was based on financial inclusion principles detailed by the Gates Foundation to provide an open loop interoperable open loop interoperability between providers to have adherence to an international financial inclusion standards. I have a push payment model with immediate funds transferred in same day settlement so no waiting for cash. Adequate system wide fraud and security protection. And as I'm sure you all can appreciate collaborating on addressing fraud and security protection across a group of participants is a more efficient way to address this then as a silo. A more efficient proportional identity and know your customer requirements. We wanted to meet or exceed the benefits and utility of cash in these days of COVID. We can certainly appreciate the fact that more and more countries around the globe are trying to address their use of cash. And of course what we wanted to do is make sure that the platform was customizable so that folks could adjust the platform to meet their needs and and they're both a regulatory and their their local needs. And how are we doing this well first of all what we decided to do earlier this year is launch the Moja loop foundation. Similar to many of the organizations that you may be affiliated with has a mission to deliver open source software to address the financial inclusion mission. We're doing this with with a mix of participants. We have the the generosity of charitable organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation, a media network who are aligned with us on our mission and want to help support our efforts to to address this challenge. We also have technology providers such as Google, Coil, ModusBox, Ripple, Geore Digital and Cyber and these companies are are very well positioned in the payment space. They understand the challenges we're trying to address with respect to financial inclusion and they're bringing engineering resources to bear to help us address this this challenge. The module foundation was formed this year as I mentioned but we've had a lot of history since 2016 when we kicked off the project as an open source development effort. We've gone through three full phases of development over those years. We're now in phase four development, wrapping that up this year and we'll move into phase five. We have a pretty robust code base already in place and in fact have several deployments underway. Right now one of those deployments is Muali, which is a joint venture between Orange and MTN, two very large mobile network operators in Africa. And they're collaborating to deliver a mojo loop based system to their customer base. And that has recently gone live and will continue to expand across the continent. We also have the Bank of Tanzania, which is currently in development of a mojo loop based platform as Costa alluded to earlier in his slides. So we're in a really good position now to leverage all that hard work our developers have put into the code base and start rolling out new deployments around the world. I mean, we talk about Africa a lot and it's an important sector for us because of the proportion of citizens that are unbanked. But there's certainly use for this platform all over the world. Even in my own country, the United States, there's still a disparity in financial services delivered to the poor and unbanked. As far as how we go about the development of mojo loop. What we've done is we certainly have a community driven driven development process that said we adhere to an agile development model. We are rapidly designing, building, configuring, testing and rolling out new iterations three, four times a year. Our community meets four times a year for a week. In fact, the week of October 19th, they'll be meeting face, not face to face, I'm sorry, virtually, we used to hold them face to face. But as you know, we're all in a virtual world now. But at those meetings, what the community does is evaluate progress on work to date and establish priorities for the next program increment. This is a cycle that we're now, this is our 12th program increment starting the week of October 19th. So the community is pretty well accustomed to a mode of operation and welcoming to others that want to jump on board and contribute to the work streams. That community does vote on the work streams based on on market requirements and gap analysis. And then that sets the priorities for the next program increment. It's a very open process, it's inclusive of developers, implementers and customers. We welcome all to those those convenings they're always open and free to anyone that wants to participate. And the agenda spans from business issues to technical issues to market issues. So it's a very diverse set of people that are contributing to those work stream discussions every every 12 or 13 weeks. So that's phase four of our development cycle in January of this year. As I said, we're wrapping it up and we'll start phase five in January 2021. So we'd welcome you to hop on and and join us in that effort. I'd be remiss and not identifying some of the key technologies that are the underpinnings of the mojo loop offering. It's a Linux based solution, but there are many other technologies that you're probably familiar with that are dependencies enrolling out a mojo loop instance. So as you see noted here, many of you are probably affiliated with some of these open source organizations, and we thank you for your ongoing support of those platforms that are so important to our work. And the other thing about the mojo loop that's important to note is that we have, we're hosting agnostic. We have Amazon Web Services platform that we're using for development. We have Azure instances that have been tested out. But what we're finding particularly in developing countries there is a need and an interest in holding the deployment close to home. There's regulatory issues. There's data privacy issues. And so we want to make sure that any option is open to to the customers. They can use a cloud based service or they can host it on premises themselves. There's a lot more detail about the technology. And for those of you that know me it'd be dangerous for me to go too far into the architecture. There's a lot of information on our GitHub repository about the architecture and all these technologies and how they how they play in the design of the system. So I'd encourage you to check that out at the link shared on the slide. For a little bit more about the community. We've been operating now as an open source project for nearly four years. And what we've done over that time is developed a very strong base of participants across all spectrums. We have financial services payment platforms, central banks regulators and developers and developers are obviously key to our code base, but having over 650 participants providing feedback requirements input testing, etc is really important and we will continue to grow this this community. As the project evolves, it's the community span six continents and 47 countries. So we have a very well rounded voice, providing input into the project. And as I mentioned earlier, we have 10 members that have recently joined the foundation when we launched, providing operational and governance support to to the legal entity. What we really have set out to do is build an ecosystem that benefits everyone. FinTechs and banks can use the code to modify their existing systems or to enhance what they're they're offering they have today as far as platform payments platforms. Central banks can speed up deployment of national payment gateways with commercial partners. So a good example that's like such as Bank of Tanzania has done. Governments can use mojo loop to deliver support payments to citizens right into their mobile wallets. Governments can have customers pay their bills directly from their phones and users to customers point don't necessarily have to walk miles anymore to transfer money to friends and family members can be simply done via their their mobile phone. So we we're building out this robust ecosystem. And again, welcoming all to participate in the ongoing development efforts as they progress. Well, mobile wallets are an important factor here. And they've really made cashless transactions easier, but they're often isolated from mainstream financial providers. And what we wanted wanted to do with mojo loop is ensure that there was inappropriate ability across all the different players in the in the ecosystem to allow a consumer to be able to use the tool of choice for them that makes sense with a relationship with a business or a bank or government as needed, but have the ability to exchange that money across very various different providers so that thus the interoperability is so key. So how do we enable interoperability in this payment platform. There's four key components to this. First of all, there's an interoperability layer that connects bank accounts mobile money wallets and merchants in an open loop system emphasis open loop that's that's an important shift for payments in particularly in the developing countries. Second, we provide a directory service layer that navigates the digits that providers use to identify accounts on each side of a transaction. So ensure that those accounts are validated and and accurate. Third, we provide a transaction settlement layer that makes payments instant and irrevocable. The instant is so important. If if you're making $2 a day or living on $2 a day, you can't afford to be without that cash for several days. That's that's something that we want to change. And then what we have is components designed for implementing strong internal fraud controls. So the fraud and risk management is a very important point for for all financial institutions to navigate. And we wanted to make it a flexible approach so that they can refine their solution based on local and regulatory requirements. I want to stop for a moment and talk about the advantages of open source software to to to the masses in this room, so to speak that are already indoctrinated. But I think it's important for us to recognize something that you all have adopted for some time now and and enjoy the benefits of in the projects that you've been working with. So first of all, with open source and the module platform, the capital cost of front is lower. First of all, there's no licensing fee, but also we've made it easy for someone to test it out, download it create an entire module of instance on a laptop, test it out and then move from there. So very low entry barrier to entry and and testing out the system. There's no maintenance costs, because the, the, the effort is shared across many organizations. One company does not have to pay for all the maintenance costs doesn't have to hire all the developers to do the maintenance the community will continue to maintain it. There's no vendor lock in. Again, when you when you deploy a system like this, it's in for the long haul it's not you don't swap out your payment platform every two years. The other issue is that you don't have vendor lock in you're not at the whims of a company of a commercial company that might say time to upgrade or time to add to pay more for new features. You're free from that lock in. And also it's a lower lower cost to acquire additional functionality. I mean, let's face it, there's, you know, is when you look at banking systems and financial systems there's some rules and regulations that are are unique to your country but there are many others that are common across many different countries and regions. And when you have an issue with your system. You come back to the community and the community might work on it and find that there's five or 10 or 15 other entities that are having the same issues and challenges. So that's through that collaboration. The community can develop new functionality. And again, you're not opening the checkbook to pay for that. And the long range, the benefits from having this this ecosystem are profound. First of all, at the individual level, it could reach well over a million and a half, a billion and a half individuals that currently are unbanked or underserved. Businesses not only can save money with this type of platform, but they also can open up new avenues for transactions and loans to small businesses and individuals. Digital financial service providers can also see tremendous business benefit and also take some of the costs associated with cash out of their their operating expenses. And then governments can have a more efficient way to deliver their benefits and payments to their citizens in a in a more transparent and interoperable way. So how to engage. There are a number of ways for folks to engage. If you're in the financial sector if you're fintech if you're a central bank. You can adopt the modular platform. Use it to extend your current offerings or to create new lines of business or new offerings out into the marketplace. You can contribute code. We obviously are always looking for new community members to participate. In the module community. Again, our convenings are open. And if you go to our website you'll see that there are easy ways to get onboarded into the community. We do have a community manager that will happily talk to you and help you walk through the code base and understand what the priorities are and how you can engage. And it's not just coding. There's there's testing that needs to be done. There's documentation that needs to be updated. There's evangelism that needs to be done. So, you know, if you want to be an ambassador for the Mojloop Foundation, we'd be happy to have that contribution as well. And then finally you can join the Mojloop Foundation. As I mentioned early on, we have a great mix of charitable and technology companies who support our mission of addressing financial inclusion. So providing resources to the community, organizing events, providing them with tools and a hosting platform for the development infrastructure. As you know, that all costs money. And so the Mojloop Foundation exists to take away that friction for the developers. You know, in addition to being the steward of the open source code and the trademarks, we also want to make sure that we make it as easy as possible for developers to participate in the community and contribute to it. So if you're interested in joining, I'd be happy to talk to you. So with that, I'd like to encourage you to check out the Mojloop website. There is a direct links to all of our GitHub repositories so you can find out, you can go deep on the technical very quickly. There's also an opportunity if you engage with us on the discourse platform. That's that first US URL in the second section of the slide, the Mojloop underscore OSS 20. That takes you right to a discourse session where you can ask questions about these these slides meet our community manager and talk about how you might be able to engage with with the Mojloop Foundation. So with that, we would welcome your questions either now or at the on discourse, happy to engage you and thank you for your attention.