 Hello, everyone. Welcome to this presentation done by Paula Hunter and myself. Paula is the Mojado Foundation Executive Director. My name is Costa Peric. I'm the Mojado Foundation Chair of the Board and also Deputy Director of the Four Financial Services for the Poor at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Let's start by putting ourselves in the shoes of someone who lives on less than two dollars per day on average. It is expensive to be poor. Why? Because the poor people, the only way they have to transact for financial transactions is with cash. And dealing with cash in addition to security issues takes time and energy because essentially to pay for things, you have to walk. You have to walk to the utility. You have to walk to school. You have to work to the merchant to actually hand over the cash, which takes time and energy. Because in the case of where these people live, sometimes walking to the school can take you hours. The other interesting case is when a rural household has a child working in the city. The son may want to send money back, but in fact, probably he has to pay to transport this cash back to the family because he has to pay some friend or bus driver to actually travel and do that. So it is very difficult and expensive to be poor and be essentially also be excluded from the formal economy by dealing only with cash. So the basic innovation that first time helped this population, of which by the way, there is 1.7 billion on the planet today. And if we look at Africa, 400 million. So the basic, the first innovation that aimed to help people in this situation was invented in Kenya some 11 years ago through a commercial system called M-Pesa that was run by a telco provider and that's called, that was called mobile money. And the way it works is that it allows you to send and receive money pretty much in the same way that you send and receive text messages. Over time, the system in Kenya has proven hugely successful in terms of helping the poorest access to the formal economy and easing the burden on their lives and in some cases get out of poverty by better managing their money. And Pesa has also proven that it can be profitable to serve this population obviously in a very different way than a traditional bank would do. So over time, if we look at Africa, a number of mobile money operations were created. We see here the situation in 2018 with some statistics. But in fact, today over more than 250 operations exist in Africa in terms of mobile money. And so while this was, this is obviously great and shows great progress. Still today, as I mentioned, there is 1.7 billion people remaining to be connected. And therefore, there is a need to accelerate further this innovation to do that. How do we do that? The key word is interoperability. And in this, for this one, it's Tanzania actually that's innovating a few years ago where the four mobile money operators started essentially connecting their systems together. And by doing that, they actually are growing the market before in, you know, the typical mobile money operation today is like a silos in the sense that both the sender and receiver have to be on the same network to be able to transact. And while it's great, you can see also very limited. Imagine that you had a mobile phone where you could talk to people only connected to the same network as you wouldn't be very useful. Well, mobile money is the same. And in Tanzania, these four mobile money operators realized and interconnected their systems together. So let's see what was the result of that. Yes, so as you can see, interoperability really allows to grow the market. And when financial service providers realize that an internet connect, we observe this huge exponential curve of growth. Another good example of this would be in India, the UPI system, which is also a real time interoperable payment platform connecting banks. In India, we saw this also this huge curve of growth. So that shows how interoperability is the next wave of innovation. And in the, in the case of interoperability, one question obviously comes to mind is how to do it. And that is where Mojaloop open source software plays a role. Mojaloop is an open source free for everyone software that enables easily to connect various financial service providers and payment systems together. And therefore, it is kind of like a tool to, for people to take and implement interoperability in service of market financial inclusion, but also growing the markets in low income countries and elsewhere as well. Before I hand over to Paula to explain in more detail what Mojaloop is, let me just finish with this last slide that shows kind of a typical architecture of a payment system platform in a country or region. And on the bottom side shows the collaborative space where typically we see collaboration to create rules that govern the payment platforms and obviously the regulatory framework that applies. And then the rails that are actually providing the interconnectivity and payment flows. And these two layers are typically considered utilities, so collaborative space to, to create these rails. And this is where the Mojaloop foundation is active and working. The why, why it is important to create this payment platform as a utility, because it's a level playing field for competitive providers to come in to provide accounts and wallet services and also innovative applications. So that's how this ecosystem works, essentially is collaborate to compete better. So that's a brief overview of financial inclusion and payment platforms, the interoperable payment platforms. Now let me hand over to Paula to talk more about Mojaloop. Thank you for this. Thank you, Costa. And thank you all for joining us today to hear more about Mojaloop and the Mojaloop Foundation. I think what I would like to start with here today is to emphasize that Mojaloop is an open source software toolkit that's designed to enable interoperability across payment service providers. So folks are free to download the open source software. It's Apache 2.0 licensed. It's on GitHub. And we welcome folks that want to learn more about Mojaloop, deploy it or operate it to visit our GitHub repository and dive right in and get to know the platform. But let's talk a little bit more about the design of Mojaloop and how it came about. The fundamental principles behind the design of the Mojaloop platform is the financial inclusion level one project principles. The level one project was defined by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And these principles are an important foundation to our decisions with regard to the platform. First of all, we provide an open loop interoperable platform for providers to engage with. We adhere to international financial inclusion standards. We provide a push payment model with immediate fund transfer and same day settlement. We want to ensure adequate system-wide shared fraud and security protection. Efficient and proportional know your customer standards. Meeting or exceeding the convenience and cost and utility of cash, which is so important in these times of pandemic. Folks are really conscious about shifting away from cash. And we have to provide a customizable software stack so that folks can update and evolve their systems to ensure appropriate compliance with their own operational standards and local and national regulations. So the Mojaloop Foundation is relatively new. We were just formed in May of this year. And we were founded based on the principles of providing inclusive digital payments in emerging economies. We're very fortunate to have the support of both charitable and technology leaders in the space. From a charitable side, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Omidyar Network have invested in the Mojaloop Project because it lines with their charitable mission and is consistent with the standards that they want to see employed to address financial inclusion. We're also very fortunate to have technology leaders like Google, Coil, ModusBox, Ripple, PhonePage, Jory Digital, and Cybern who have joined in on this initiative to provide the technology leadership and insight to deploy Mojaloop around the globe. So the compatibility between our mission and our technology partners will allow us to expand and grow around the world. And the Mojaloop platform is not new. The good news is we started work on this in 2016. We kicked off the project in mid-year of 2016. We started work on an open API specification. We launched the open source platform in 2017. And then we started launching community meetings. The first one being held in 2018. We've since just finished our 12th community meeting just this past October. And so we've really made a tremendous amount of progress even given the fact that as a legal entity we only formed this year. We're now in our closing days of phase four development. And we're planning for phase five development in January of 2021. And as Costa mentioned, we've been engaging with the marketplace to start seeing deployments of the Mojaloop offering. The Bank of Tanzania is working with the code base to initiate a single payment system. And we also have Moale, which is a first commercial deployment, which is a joint venture between Orange and MTN, which are two very large mobile network operators in Africa. And they have announced a Pan-African partnership to deploy Mojaloop-based platforms. They have launched implementations this year and will continue to expand and grow those implementations into next year. So let's talk a little bit about our development model and why it is so important for us to have this inclusive developer community. We follow a agile development process, which means that we iterate on our work on a regular cadence three times a year. We have meetings where we talk about our workstream progress and we establish our priorities for the next program increment. The community is very much involved in determining what workstreams we will focus on in the upcoming program increment. And that's based on market requirements and gap analysis. Again, that the community articulates as being a priority. It's a very open process. It's inclusive of developers, implementers, and customers. So everyone can participate in our community meetings and everyone has a vote on what our priorities are for the next iteration of work. As I mentioned, we entered phase four of our development cycle early this year. We're wrapping it up and we'll launch phase five in our January meeting in 2021. Some of the core technologies that many of you in this presentation are probably very familiar with. So as you can see, we have an array of open source tools and technologies that are the underpinnings of the Mojulu platform. Of course, Linux-based, but many other important technologies are part of the solution. And I have to thank many of you that have contributed to these other technologies that are really essential for us to be able to deploy this type of solution. With regard to hosting of the platform, we're infrastructure agnostic. Our development platform right now is on Amazon Web Server. We have Azure implementations already deployed. But we also want folks to have the freedom to do on-premise installations with some government and regulatory agencies having very tight control of the infrastructure and the data really dictates how they host the platform. So it's perfectly acceptable and designed to be either cloud-based or hosted in-house. If you want more details on the tools and technologies, you should just check out our GitHub repositories. And you can find out a lot more about the tools and technologies that make up the Mojulu platform. Let's talk a little bit more about our community. From the onset, we really wanted the Mojulu community to be multinational, provide perspective around the globe with regard to this platform. Our center of gravity for early work was to meet market needs in Africa, where there is a large percentage of unbanked and underserved individuals. But we have contributions and input from countries across the globe. We're up to over 650 participants in our community. We span six continents, 47 countries, and we have 10 sponsor promoter members. So when we do those week-long planning sessions, community meetings, as I mentioned, we just finished one earlier in October, we get input from all over the globe from a wide range of participants, whether it be digital financial service providers, central banks, implementers, open source developers. So it's a very rich and robust community that's guiding us through our development. And what we want to do is make sure that we have this ecosystem that benefits everyone. There's a lot of stakeholders here involved in the Mojulu solution. First of all, there's fintechs, fintechs and banks that can use the code to modify internal systems or extend their external, the internal systems so that they can easily interoperate with other payment providers. Central banks can speed up deployment of national payment gateways and work with commercial partners, again having an interoperable platform. Governments can use Mojulu to deliver support payments to citizens right into their mobile wallets. As you know, with the pandemic right now, government payments are becoming increasingly frequent and the necessary for efficient, cost-effective and speedy delivery has never been more important. Merchants want their customers to be able to pay their bills directly from their phones. The reduction of use of cash is always desirable for merchants and banks. And then the users, as Costa mentioned, some users today have to walk miles or pay for someone to transport the miles to send money to their relatives or to pay a small bill. This way, they, using a Mojulu-enabled system, they can use their mobile phones and reduce the cost and complexity of being part of the banking system. There's four primary ways in which Mojulu enables an interoperable payments platform. First, there's an interoperability layer that connects bank accounts, mobile money wallets, and merchants in an open loop system. Open loop is so important here to make sure that consumers are not locked into one platform and can share money across different platforms. We have a directory service layer that navigates different methods that providers use to identify accounts on each side of a transaction. So, specific to what the service provider needs in order to validate those accounts. We have transaction settlement layer that makes payments instant and irrevocable. If you're making $2 a day, if you're living off of $2 a day, you cannot afford to wait 24 hours or 48 hours for a payment to clear. It's so critical to have instant payment settlement. And of course, we have components for designing and implementing strong internal fraud controls. We need that component to be very flexible for the unique requirements of each region and regulatory requirements. Now, I know a lot of you in the audience probably understand the benefits of open source, but it warrants reiterating the advantages of open source software in delivering the Mojulu platform. First of all, there's a lower capital cost upfront to deploy the open source software. As you know, open source software is licensed free and it allows people to not only deploy without those costs, but also to test drive and create a proof of concept or do a sandbox in a very low cost way to get themselves going with the platform. As far as lower maintenance costs are concerned, because this is a shared effort across many organizations, as we continue to expand those that are involved, if we have multiple banks, multiple central banks, multiple fintechs, it's likely that some of their challenges or issues or requirements are similar. And that allows us to share the efforts of maintaining those various offerings and features across the community. There's also no vendor lock-in, so there doesn't require you to go, if you need new features, if you need enhancements, you don't have to go back to a vendor and write a check to see that that work happen. You're able to tap into the community and again, probably find like-minded companies that have similar requirements and share the burden of developing that additional functionality and maintaining that additional functionality. So this is, you know, this development model is the perfect solution for rolling out a low-cost interoperable platform for financial inclusion. And the entire ecosystem benefits. So as MojiLoop comes online, it could reach up to 1.6 billion individuals that currently have no banking accounts today. Businesses will see an increase in the transaction volume. It estimates by the folks that wrote this study, it's well over $2 trillion. Digital financial service providers will see more transaction and activity, new account holders, and new participants in their offerings. And governments will save billions of dollars in being able to disperse funds out to the populace in a more cost-effective way rather than cutting checks or dispersing cash. So there's plenty of opportunities for you to engage with us and we encourage you to investigate more fully on how you might be able to do that. But let's talk about a couple of ways in which you can collaborate with us. First of all, our ultimate goal is to see adoption of the MojiLoop platform out in the marketplace. So whether you're a central bank, a digital financial service provider, or other financial institution, we'd encourage you to test out the code, try it out, we will help you with setting up a sandbox and a proof of concept and enabling you to adopt the platform. You can also contribute to the platform. Of course, we're always looking for developers to contribute code to the various work streams that we are working on. But there's other ways to contribute. You can contribute on documentation, you can contribute on advocacy, awareness, education. So there's a number of ways that you can engage with the community. And hopefully when you come to our website, you'll find a number of ways. And if it's not clear to you, reach out to myself or community manager or product manager, we'll happily walk you through the various areas that need your support. And then finally, you can join the MojiLoop Foundation. As they mentioned, we were formed in May of this year as a 501c3 nonprofit. And of course, there are some operating costs in ensuring that we have the development platform in place, that we have staff to manage the community, that we provide the sales tools and training materials for the community to advance the use of MojiLoop. That always obviously involves some cash outlay. And so by joining as a member of the foundation, such as some of our other benefactors have recently, you can help underwrite the ongoing cost and development of the platform. So with that, a couple of things that I'd encourage you to check out. First of all, do check out our website, MojiLoop.io. We also have a community manager, Simeon Orico, who is available to engage with you to talk to you about how you might participate in the development work or in other areas. There also is a discourse session, the link that you see in the MojiLoop underscore OSS F20. That is a discourse session where you can ask additional questions about this session or about MojiLoop in general. So we'd certainly encourage you to participate, engage and ask any questions. We're here to help you understand more about how MojiLoop can really make an impact on financial inclusion and we'd welcome your participation. Thank you very much.