 But that was when I started my career in Linux, trying to corral these four distros into having a unified distro. It was fun until the lawsuits started flying, but I'm dating myself as to when I first entered the open source marketplace and killing time while I'm waiting for my slides. But I'll talk to them and hopefully they'll bring me a dongle in a moment. My name is Paula Hunter. I'm Executive Director of the Mojloop Foundation. My last 20 years, I've been managing nonprofit foundations in either the open source space or the standard space. Until three years ago, I was managing the Near Field Communications Technology Organization, NFC Forum, which does the technology for iPhones and Samsung phones for wallets and secure chips. But I made a pivot three years ago to join them to form the Mojloop Foundation, which was a project that was... The vision came from the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation because what they wanted to do was address the challenges of financial inclusion, particularly in Africa and now what we're finding in many other markets around the world. And what the Mojloop Foundation is is what it looks like, a traditional open source foundation. We have a developer community. We run events, et cetera, et cetera. We're a member of FINOS. And, but we also have some unique characteristics. And what I want to do is put it in the context of digital public goods, which is the moniker that is used for open source projects in the public goods sector, usually very focused on developing markets, developing countries, highly involved with philanthropic organizations that underwrite infrastructure projects and of course the governments themselves. So I'm going to talk a little bit about digital public goods and a specific project that we're involved with called G2P Connect, which is government to person, being able to distribute payments from a government to citizens across their country. I'll talk a little bit about how Mojloop is leveraging open source and happy to take any questions. So recently a German organization took a stab at defining digital public goods, which I found very revealing. They said they combine three fundamental characteristics. One, they're non-rivalrous, which is refreshing in this commercial era we live in. Non-excludable, everyone can participate, everyone can take advantage of the digital public good and globally available. Sounds similar to open source, right? So DPG is a moniker that's used in this space that basically recharacterizes open source software as a digital public good, because in particular, again, in developing markets and economies, they wanna know that the intent of this project is strictly public good. Why is that important? Well, DPG's, the government agencies want to be able to have free unfettered access. Again, all of the attributes that you would find in open source. But they have unique challenges with regard to vendor lock-in and being able to scale their projects. And again, if these are government led projects, they often don't have the resources to come to conferences like this. We recently had our developer conference in Tanzania in October. And we have Bank of Tanzania, Bank of Rwanda, Guinea. All of those banks actively involved with Mojloop and getting deployments going. They can't afford to send their people to those meetings, which is such a shame because we've got a hundred developers from all over the world in one room for a week. They can't send their developers. So we pay their tickets basically. That's why being able to leverage and adapt projects that are being used elsewhere in the region are so important to them. Otherwise, they do it in a narrow vision of how they solve the problem. They don't benefit from the open source collaboration. They don't benefit from lessons learned from other projects that are scaling up. They also really wanna see that the project is sustainable. So I'm sure some of you have been involved with smaller open source projects. The question always comes, who's gonna manage this project for the long term? Who's backing it? What key companies are involved in the project? And so just like Linux Foundation, we have member companies that have committed long range to the project. Google, for example, is one of our major committers. But I'll talk a little bit more about how we have kind of a hybrid model for managing that issue. The other thing that is critically important and it's as part of a control issue as is a pride issue is country ownership, country sovereignty over their project. So on the one hand, they understand and appreciate the benefits of open source but they want it to be their solution. And we're even finding that this would be a huge issue with cloud deployments. They want data sovereignty. They're very worried about data privacy. We'll roll out a proof of concept on AWS or Azure, but they wanna do it on-prem. And so what happens is as they start building out the on-prem environment, they start realizing how attractive AWS and Azure and other cloud services are. But at the government level, at the top levels of the IT agencies and stuff, there's still very much a lot of awareness and they want to do it all in-house. We're hoping to break through that over time. We're agnostic. I mean, we don't care what they deploy it on, but we do think there's significant advantages of cloud-based deployments. So how do DPGs differ from open source foundations like Finno's, who became part of Linux Foundation? Typically, if founded in the United States, and we are our headquarters in Massachusetts, registered in Delaware, we're 501c3. So in the tax code, we're a charity for public good. Linux Foundation's a 501c6, which is a vendor-driven organization. So still not a for-profit, but Linux Foundation can deliver benefits to its members. I can't. I'm a charity. Everyone has to benefit equally from what we do. It also allows us to accept grants from Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, UNICEF, et cetera. They want a CC3. They will not grant to a CC6 or to a for-profit. So that forced our structure. But what we did was we made it a hybrid. Thankfully, our attorney used to be attorney for the Linux Foundation, so he understands how to merge the two scenarios. So we do have a membership structure that allows the technology companies to join, provide membership dues, provide code contribution, et cetera. I just can't deliver enhanced value to them. I can give them a more control of our mission and governance, but I can't give them unique, I can't give them discounts to attend conferences or things like that, even though our conferences are free for now. And those grants and dues go to funding our operations, our development environment. We don't pay for code development, but we certainly provide DevOps and release management and cloud platforms. And also we need money for deployment assistance because it typically, still don't have a dongle. Hopefully you guys see my slides online. Typically, we go to a country like Rwanda, the extremely visionary about instant payment, delivery to their citizens, keen to do it, don't have the money. This happens in probably 80% of the opportunities we look at for Mojlo. And so what happens? We go out to the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, GIZ in Germany, the Foundation in Norway, and we say, here's an infrastructure project that needs funding. And believe it or not, there is a lot of money out there for infrastructure projects in developing economies. What it does is it makes the deployment more complex because it has to go the whole process of acquiring the grant and getting, you know, doing all the justifications there. So it definitely lengthens the deployment time for these types of projects, but the good news is that there is money out there. And so the other thing is the vendor ecosystem is not nearly as mature as what you find here in the United States and Europe and other developing markets. So, you know, the systems integrators, for example, the big ones, the Accenture, the Ernst and Youngs, et cetera, they're waiting and watching, you know, they do stuff for money, right? I don't begrudge them that. But in this situation where you have an emerging platform and emerging markets, they're saying, should we invest the resources to become fluent in Mojlo or any other DPG? So what we're trying to do is convince them, yes, there is opportunity. We're not anti-capitalism. We're happy to have people make money selling and deploying services on these projects. It just takes time for them to get up to embrace them. In the meantime, what we're doing is working in countries and building out systems integrators' expertise to help implement and deploy and operate Mojlo-based systems. Again, another layer of complexity, but it just speaks to the, you know, the nascent status of this industry. So the ecosystem for digital public goods includes, first and foremost, the grant-making entities. I could not breed without funds from Gates Foundation, Rockefeller, et cetera. There's also government-funded initiatives and NGOs, UNCDF, Digital Impact Alliance, there's acronym SUP there, all kinds of entities that are trying to advance financial inclusion, trying to advance public infrastructure projects. And so they might bring money or expertise to bear in advocacy, education, et cetera. We also need the technology vendors. I can show you the logos, but I don't have my screens. Sorry. You know, we have, you know, the Googles and the modus boxes and the coils and ripples that are part of our membership. We work closely with Microsoft on the Azure variants. All, you know, what you would see in a traditional open-source foundation. Systems integrators are key, very important. Here's the example of Rwanda earlier. Again, visionary with regard to what they wanted to deliver to their citizens for instant payments. Don't have the funds. Don't have the expertise. So we just secured $8.5 million to do this project in Rwanda. Yay, let's get started. Guess what? Rwanda's IT group doesn't have the bandwidth or expertise to start the project. And, you know, you can't deploy a complex instant payment switch in a country that's gonna serve the central bank and all the financial institutions in that country without the central bank at the table in their IT department, talking about the requirements and such. So that just, again, adds time and complexity to the project. I'm hopeful we had meetings last week in Rwanda. They're starting to free up some resources to start this project. But again, it just adds new additional challenges to deployments. Even if the money's there, they don't necessarily have the bandwidth or capacity in country to do the work. And so as an organization, in addition to providing that matchmaking service, the DPGs, we have to find funders for these infrastructure projects. But we also provide, I have staff for open source product, management, DevOps, release management, work stream management, testing, providing the infrastructure, whether it be the cloud-based infrastructure, community management, advocacy and education, operations. So all the things that you enjoy from the Linux Foundation, we supply to our community as well. And again, just based on the funding from those various sources. So some of the challenges in the DPG world, and then I'll get to a specific example here in a moment. As you know, the development model of open source is dependent on contributors. Well, first of all, central banks are wary of making contributions. Nothing new even in a developed market. So they enjoy open source here. They've gotten a little more involved. They're starting to join some projects. But you guys, we've been doing open source in FinTech here in the States for 20 years. I was coming down to Wall Street 20 years ago. Central banks in developing markets, this is all new to them. And so you gotta walk before you run. I don't see contributions back to our code base from central banks for some time. What I can do is if I find funding for a project, I can make terms of the funding be you have to give back. So that's a little lever that we can leverage. As I said, many of the developing countries lack the skills and the capacity to actually start the projects. And as I said before, the markets are not fully evolved. So the big players are still waiting and watching. They come to our events. They know about Mojaloop. They've probably run it in-house, but they're not gonna train up their team until they start seeing momentum in the marketplace, which is coming. The ecosystem is highly dependent on a philanthropic funding for these deployments, which lengthens the sale cycle and lengthens the deployment cycle. And the grants, there are lifeblood. There's many, many millions of dollars upon funds available. Gates Foundation just announced a 20 million grant to co-develop yesterday as a group that we're participating with on this next project I'm gonna talk about. So this project I wanted to decide as an example is called G2P Connect. It's an open source collaboration effort to bring government to person payments to market. And envision yourself a refugee in Jordan. You have the clothes on your back, that's it. Jordan has been very generous in providing resources and funds to, they have a very large refugee population. But they have to distribute cash, which is risky. And these people have to hold on to the cash, which is risky. And cash is inefficient. It's dirty and it's inefficient. And even other more developed economies in, I was in Singapore in March, no one would accept cash. Because of COVID, they view it as dirty. And it's true, I mean cash is dirty, let's face it. The less we can do with cash, the better. So if a government, and this even holds true in the United States, can distribute aid payments via electronic means, it's more efficient, it's more hygienic, and it's less risky for the recipient. So what we need to do, unfortunately is a lot of these refugees and recipients of this aid don't have bank accounts, but they all have phones. Not smart phones, I think Apple's market share in Africa is 7%. If you're in Joberg, you're gonna see iPhones. If you're in Arusha, you're not, you're gonna see just flip phones and some feature phones. They all can scan QRs, right? And they all can have some type of wallet-based system. So deploying this as a collaborative effort is going to allow us to prove to these governments that they can deliver payments, aid payments, et cetera, using open source technologies. So this vision came from the World Bank, which obviously is seeing this opportunity and need across the world. And what they did was they pulled together a number of open source projects or digital public goods, including Mojloop, Moasep, Mifos, OpenSPP, all acronym soup, it's in my deck when you see it, whenever you see it. But think about it, in this summer they called and they called and said, we need to do a demonstration for the World Bank in October at their annual conference. All the countries will be there and we want to see you knit together eight open source projects for a demonstration. And I guess what, these eight open source projects, you're talking about 40 time zones. It's maddening trying to get it all done because you've got all across Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, East Coast, West Coast, there is no good time to have a call, none. Someone's in their pajamas or having their first sip of coffee. But we were able to pull together and really define a specification for government to person payments as a blueprint that can also be extended and enhanced to add other benefits to these recipients. So while the focus right now is G2P, there's other scenarios and use cases that we could address through this integrated platform. So just to give you a sense of the components, and as I said, there's onto seven open source projects. There's scheme management, there's payment and settlement services, there's bank or mobile wallet systems, and then last mile cash in, cash out systems. So what we needed to do is knit together these solutions, make sure our APIs could talk to another to create a demonstration. We succeeded, we did a smoke and mirrors demonstration to the World Bank in October, but the project continues and now that we've gotten through that first fire drill, we have momentum, we've coalesced all these different communities together against this purpose. There's a website, there's links, there's a GitHub link and discussion forum. Again, you'll see it on the slides. So I'm gonna just give a few more pieces of information about Mojloop and then I can take questions. So the vision for Mojloop was to address financial inclusion. Most commercial banks are not delivering services out to rural populations in developing countries. So if you're a woman that has a little bodega on the side of the road, you get a microfinance loan to cover your inventory. And then at the end of the week, you walk to an exchange where you can cash in, pay your microfinance loan, maybe cash back out to pay someone else. Every time you cash in and cash out or make a payment, you're paying a transaction fee. Now this person might live off of $100 a month. So every transaction fee cuts into her income, probably $20 a month in fees. We wanna get rid of those transaction fees, get rid of the middleman if we can, so that she can take her phone and make a payment to her microfinance loan rather than having to walk two miles to someone that's gonna transfer the funds for her. So what's really important is a, interoperability. I mean, if you go in like, recently in Tanzania I was at a merchant, they had like eight card readers for different credit card companies. It's not interoperable. I mean, where's the MVCO and you need them? I rarely say that, but the merchant has to pay for each terminal and of course they're paying transaction costs. So there's a lot of inefficiency in the system. So have interoperability, not only between the different merchants, but also the different card companies, different banks and the mobile network operators. So knitting all those people together and providing instantaneous payments. In some cases, they had to wait 24 hours or longer for a payment to settle. We gotta get rid of that. We don't realize how easy it is to deal with money and digital transactions here in the States to get out into some of these remote regions. We advocate for push payments, not pull. Obviously need to address the regulators and central bank requirements and every country is different. So that, again, we need to be on the ground and make sure that we're not doing things that break the regulatory environment in a particular country. And obviously have to have various levels of KYC. So, as a central switch, we're really trying to help hub operators with banks and non-banks to exchange payments. We're not end user focused at all. So no one's gonna be able to tell you about Mojloop on the ground as a citizen in any of these countries. By the way, anyone know what Moja means? Anyone? I've got another gift, a prize. Moja, huh? Now Moja is Swahili for one, one loop, one integrated loop for all. And what we wanna do is connect existing infrastructure as required, ACH, POS, ATM. So we're not trying to replace what's on the ground but make it more efficient in interoperability, in interoperable and where possible, reduce costs, reduce transaction fees and make it more accessible to people that are in remote and rural locations. The core technologies just for the sake of folks, the open source techies in the room, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, Helm, JavaScript, no JS, Francher, MySQL, Kafka, Interledger, probably forgotten a few. But obviously, thank you all for the contribution of those open source code bases because we're highly dependent on them. As I mentioned, we advocate for cloud-based deployments but we're agnostic. Our development environment is AWS. Microsoft just came in and optimized us for Azure so we can roll out a proof of concept in two hours to a bank on AWS or Azure very quickly. But again, if they want to do non-prem, that's fine. If we can get proof of concepts up and running quickly, it allows them to kick the tires and discuss the digital use cases. So this is motherhood and apple pie but again, I've been in open source for 20 years. I forget the value of open source is not fully understood worldwide. You guys, it's in your DNA. That's not true globally. So really emphasizing the fact that by participating in open source community, your deployment is part of this community of developers that can add features and enhancements and maintenance and if you decide to add another plug-on or feature, it can be rolled back into the core, tested by the community. You don't have to maintain it. Very appealing to them. It's just, they've not really benefited from it thus far. It also allows for fee structures that match in their needs. In a lot of cases, some of the proprietary software vendors are going into these countries and saying, yeah, we can manage and deploy a switch. Oh, we're gonna take a piece of each transaction. That doesn't help drive transaction costs down. Not very appealing. And then what it does is it builds out a community and that's why it's so important for us to get them to our community meetings. If they're on an edge of the deployment or a proof of concept, they can come in a room with a hundred other people that know Mojloop deeply. It's, the light bulb comes on. They realize, oh, I have this whole set of resources that I can touch base with on GitHub or Slack or whatever channel. So it's, the proof is in the pudding when they come in and they spend time with their developers for a week or so, it makes all the difference. Right now our community, not just development, but our community at large is about 1,400 people on six continents, 47 countries and we have 10 technology sponsor members. So getting, at each convening that we hold, we hold two a year now that COVID's gone. We typically get 100, 110 people and out of that 110 people, we usually have at least 35 countries represented. So it's a very diverse global community. Some notable projects I've mentioned a few already, but Tanzania Instant Payment System. That project started five years ago and a few false starts along the way but they are live and when we were in Zanzibar in October we were able to go around to merchants and be able to see people with different mobile network, mobile phones, different mobile network operators, different wallets, make merchant payments, do cash in, do cash out. They could not do that before this year. So those are all things that are being deployed in Tanzania. There's 62 banks that are being knit together right now. They have, I think they have five already in the system and two MNOs but they're going up to all seven MNOs on the continent and really hoping to reach at least 70 to 80% of their population with this new platform. Another situation, Myanmar. Imagine how hard it is to do business in Myanmar right now, even to get into Myanmar. Thank God for the web, right? Because we've done this project almost all remotely. And in fact, this Storks is the lead systems integrator that's running this project in Myanmar. They're actually the CEOs here in New York City. And what they've done is they've developed with funding from UNCDF a platform that provides loan repayment and loan distribution for particularly the agricultural sector but they want to expand and add peer-to-peer payments and G2P payments. And so this project has just gone live in the last few weeks. Visa is also helping fund that project. I've mentioned Rwanda a number of times. Rwanda's use cases include peer-to-peer, P2G, P2B and B2P. How's that for an acronym suit? But they want to be able to engage about 124 agents in Rwanda and over 5 million mobile money subscribers. Rwanda's a relatively small country so the numbers aren't quite as compelling. But in essence, what we want to do is build a system that benefits everyone. Great news for the FinTechs. I mean, we're leap-progging from a technology standpoint. In a lot of cases, there ain't no legacy systems in place for payments switches and hubs in these countries. And if they are, they're very rudimentary. So it's a great opportunity for the FinTechs to become involved in these projects and then differentiate at the customer level and create new service offerings in the marketplace. So the FinTechs really have a leg up in this respect because they're not competing with the big banks. The big banks aren't in these world markets. They aren't servicing them today. There are no branch banks. So it's a great opportunity. Central banks, of course, are critical in all these areas. I mean, obviously the Federal Reserve, we have great respect for them here in the United States, but you don't cross the central bank of Rwanda. You don't cross the central bank of Tanzania. You don't get anything done if you're not in the loop with them. So they're a critical part of our dialogue in these countries. Merchants are gonna benefit from these solutions. First of all, you're rid of seven or eight different readers in each kiosk. I mean, it's not these little tiny, I mean, the tiner than a corner CVS and they've got all these readers and such. So really providing services to them is very important as well. So anyway, I apologize for the lack of slides. I'm not sure what happened, but I was able to see them, but you'll be able to download them and my email address p-hunter at mojoloop.io is on the slides, but you're free to contact me, LinkedIn, what have you. So any questions from the room? A question gets a prize. Okay. Yeah, it is part of the consideration. I mean, one of the problems with refugees, as you imagine, they're coming in with no ID. So that's why GDP payments sometimes can't be dependent on the bona fides that we would expect in a market like ours. But there is a project called MOSIP, it being run out of India that we were integrating with. So we're collaborating with them. We don't do the ID aspects of the payment ecosystem. So partnering with MOSIP has been important, but also having the flexibility to have other mechanisms for people to have an account without necessarily the type of traditional ID we enjoy here in the States. Do you have a question or no, anyone else? Sure. No, we don't have any products. We're plumbing, we're plumbing. It can leverage blockchain, but we are below a blockchain. So we're creating APIs for people to transmit any type of funds across a mojo loop switch. That's dependent on the hub operator and the banks. So they decide if there's an upper limit. In our cases, what we're looking at mostly is high volume, low value transactions. And once you start getting into high value, they're already served. They have bank accounts. We're talking about low, low dollar transactions. Yeah, yeah. So India has made tremendous progress through the UPI. And that's where we're compatible in a similar philosophy to what UPI is doing. I can't compete with WhatsApp and the commercial sector on payments. And the governments have to have, depending on the government, they may or may not allow WhatsApp to have the level of autonomy that they have in a developed market. So making sure that there's an instant payment switch that is central bank endorsed and approved is critically important. It's a whole different world. And of course, the folks like WhatsApp are trying to get into these markets because they do small payments well. But you can't do it in a vacuum. Sorry, throw ball at it. Possibly. I know we talked to the National Association of Credit Unions, not me personally, but one of my delegates, as a way to have a new, a new pipeline that is interoperable. But I don't spend any time talking to U.S. market actors because their needs, right now would be a distraction for us. Yeah, welcome. I'm a terrible pitcher. So I don't blame anyone for the non-catch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that need is universal. And what's available on the ground during a disaster is kind of, that's the closest you come to being similar to the developing markets that are rural and unbanked. Yeah, yeah. COVID, yeah. Aid payments, you know, welfare payments, whatever, yeah. Yeah, the interest level spiked tremendously during the COVID era, again, part because of what was going on, but you know, just trying to get away from cash. Cross-border, oh, I could spend another two hours talking about cross-border. We actually are working on a project with the Monetary Authority of Singapore to try and do some pilot projects. Like in like, Hong Kong, you have a lot of very large Filipino population, domestic workers that want to send money home. They have to cash in. There's the currency transaction, cash out at home. Boy, those fees just kill them. So, Hong Kong, Singapore, a lot of places where there's what's called migrant workers, not necessarily agricultural migrants, but different types of migrants. That's a huge issue for the cross-border transaction. So yes, we are piloting some projects on that right now. And I'm not gonna throw a ball at you, it's too far. How about I have two left and you get the last one? Push is you're sending to the recipient rather than you're pulling money from them. I mean, like right now, in my Comcast or AT&T, they pull money from my bank account. There's a whole bunch of issues with that in a developing market. First, if they don't have a bank account, you just want to push to a wallet. So, we are not yet interested in addressing pull because we're dealing with unbanked people. And there's a level of trust that's just not there yet. The market's just not demanding it as yet. Resources, resources. Tech talent. Yeah, like the Rwanda team, they were trying to roll out another project. They couldn't, we could throw them all the money in the world. They didn't have anyone to catch it and say, okay, now let's start working. So they just, so what we've been doing is training systems integrators in Rwanda that could augment their IT team so they could get the project going. Yeah, I mean, we could fly people in from all over the world, but yeah, it's not scalable. And it's back to that sovereignty. People want their local economy to benefit from this. So if we can in parallel train out resources, that's a better long-term model. Exactly, yep, yep. It's whatever the mobile network operator or the financial institution wants it to be. But again, we're the plumbing and we want, you know, whether it's a wallet or an app or whatever, that when that user says, send this money, it comes through our pipes. No, no, that's the, we're working with the operators and the banks to design or supplement apps they already have to tap into it, but we're not at the consumer-facing level at all. That's the one good thing of, you know, the technology advancements. I mean, think about it. We didn't, you know, 10 years ago, how many people here in the state said mobile phones? Now look at it, everyone. That's the same in Africa. So they don't, you know, they're not at least dealing with, you know, that, you know, again, not sophisticated Samsung phones or Apple phones, but sufficient capability to conduct a transaction. Cost of implementing. Oh, proof of concept. Oh, proof of concept. Free. Spin it up on AWS or Azure or on the Azure Marketplace. So, you know, obviously, if you don't have your own cloud environment, if you're developing an economy, we'll find the money to spin it up. It's not significant. It's just whatever it costs to, it's, you know, we can get into testing fake money very quickly and very cheaply. So when you start going into that next phase of testing real money, that it requires a lot more resources and touch points to make those integrations. Well, if you're a fintech or commercial entity, we're not gonna do it for you, if you're afraid. You're welcome to kick the tires. You're welcome to download the code. It's on GitHub. We have called Miniloop, which is a way to, in an hour, do a full install emoji loop. So it doesn't require a lot of resources. Our Miniloop guy could walk you through it. But, you know, the subsidy goes to the government agencies and the nonprofits. But the fintechs, we're trying to make it as painless as possible for you to spin it up, test it out and see if you wanna extend and enhance from there. Well, I appreciate you, your patience without slides, but thanks for your questions. Thank you.