 Welcome, everyone. Hope you're not sleepy after lunch. This is my first live presentation in 22 months. So forgive me if I'm a little rusty. My name is Paula Hunter, and I'm the executive director of the Mojloop Foundation, a new associate member of the Finnaz organization. I've been talking to a lot of people less two days about Mojloop. And I often hear, what is Mojloop? And I've never heard of it before. So I'm going to go off script a little bit on some of my slides to hopefully give you some background on why we're doing this. So first of all, the why. Why are we developing an open source software stack for the financially underserved? Well, there's opportunity. I mean, there's nearly 2 billion people that lack access to digital financial services, even though most of them have mobile phones. Not smartphones, feature phones, but they have phones. And if we can tap into these individuals and engage them into the digital economy, the impact to the gross domestic product of various countries in particularly Africa is in the trillions. So not only does it help the individuals, but it helps the local economy. And in order to get that growth, we really need inclusive open payment systems. We need payment systems that are interoperable across providers. You can't just assume everyone's got the same mobile network operator or the same wallet. We need instantaneous settlement. People can't afford to wait for their money to arrive at their device. We want pushed, not pull payments. But we also want to address the concerns and requirements of the local regulators and central banks. And we have to provide varying levels of KYC. So let's make it a little more real. Let's look at Winnie, a shopkeeper. She depends on digital financial services for multiple reasons. She has a mix of day-to-day income and cash. And it's not an option for her to wait for settlement. So she right now cannot use a lot of the digital platforms because there's too much of a lag in when she sees the cash on hand. She also, most of her mobile money account doesn't interoperate with a customer's payment systems. So what happens is she ends up settling with cash. And so at the end of the week, she takes her cash. She'll walk two miles carrying cash, which is not exactly safe, and do a cash-in, cash-out transaction where she might pay off a portion of her microfinance loan. She might pay utilities. She might send money to a family member in another country. Problem with that is every time she does a transaction, there's a cost associated then. Imagine you make $100 a month and you have to do three or four electronic transactions every month to get bills paid to send money, et cetera. And the transaction cost could be 8, 12%. That's huge when you're making $100 a month. So we've got to reduce the transaction costs and increase the interoperability in order for folks to be able to play in this market. So on the top end of the market, what we need is convenience and innovation to serve the small business owners that want to accept digital payments and get out of this cash requirement. We also want folks to be part of the broader digital community. So it's, again, getting those microfinance loans distributed to them via wallet or digitally versus having to go somewhere to get the cash and then go somewhere again to pay off their loans. So how can Mojloop help? So first and foremost, Mojloop is an open-source software platform. Mojloop Foundation is a 501C nonprofit. I don't sell anything other than an idea. But we do have a very robust community that has been working on financial inclusion and a Mojloop platform for several years now. It's open-source software for instant payment clearing. It connects hub operators, banks, and non-banks, but not end users. The end user relationship is with the bank, the mobile network operator, the SACO, whoever has that customer relationship. We're the plumbing. We use a hub-managed process to manage all bank account funds and settlement between participants. And we connect to existing infrastructure as required, ACH, cards, point of sale, ATMs, et cetera. We're not trying to replace those technologies. We're trying to coexist and interoperate across these different technologies. It's important to emphasize how dependent we are on the open-source community for this platform, as you see by some of the logos here. We are Linux-based. We use a number of tools, open-source tools, to build out the code base. We're also hosting Agnostic. Our development platform today is on AWS. We'll be adding Azure as well. What we're finding in Africa, in the markets, and particularly that we're talking to, there's a lot of concern about data and who owns the data and data sovereignty. So there's a hesitancy to go cloud-based with these types of offerings in those markets. So what we've been doing is tuning our code base so that it can be run in-house, but using the cloud platforms for development, pilot projects, proof of concepts, sandboxes. So obviously the cloud reduces barriers to people trying things out and kicking the tires. But in many cases, the central banks are still insistent upon hosting their own instances. So what really matters when we think about financial inclusion and digital payments? I can't emphasize interoperability enough. We see some digital wallets that are successful in Africa and PES is probably one of the most successful digital transformations that you'll find on the continent, but it requires that you be within that system to exchange money. We want interoperability. We wanna make sure that regardless of who your mobile network operator is or your wallet provider or your loan provider, that your money can flow. We need the instant push payments that are settled immediately to the recipients account. People just can't budget. It's one of the reasons why cash remains king is if they have to wait, then digital provides them with no benefit. So we have to make sure that the settlements are instant. We also wanna make sure that at the last mile, that our ecosystem is innovating, innovating in how they deliver the services out to the customers. Because again, us being the plumbing, we're not creating the UI. We're not managing the relationship with the customer. And so what we need to make sure is that we have open APIs that drive that innovation. So if you look at it from the reference of a stack, Mojoloupe provides the rails for connectivity and interoperability. Allows the bank to establish the rules, the regulatory and governance framework for how the cash is transferred or the currency is transferred. And then the innovation happens at the apps and account level. There's still a lot of confusion about open source, particularly in developing countries. And one of the biggest concerns that I hear from solution providers is that we're trying to compete with them. That we're trying to undercut them by offering free software. Well, as I said, I don't sell anything. Mojoloupe Foundation does not support or sell any services associated with Mojoloupe. It's our ecosystem partners, systems integrators, solutions providers, et cetera, that take the open source code and implement it with their bank customers and other service providers. And this is something, you know, why open source that is probably not all that new for you. But it really is something that we need to reintroduce over and over again with the folks in developing markets that are as not as familiar as accepting of open source that you find here in New York or US or Europe and other developed countries. The lower capital costs up front is really important. In many cases, these countries do not have the cash on hand to start a new project. So they might be looking for grant funding. They might look for other partners to provide some type of funds to get started. So having an open source platform, cloud-based, they can test the tires, they can play with the system, they can play with the sandbox, get a sense for what the capabilities are of the platform. And as they roll to full migration, they don't have to worry about those licensing fees. And then of course, the maintenance and additional functionality, you all know this is a huge benefit for open source. What we've found is that while we preach this, it doesn't really resonate until they get into the throes of a pilot project or a proof of concept. And they have questions and they go back to our community. And while they might have a relationship with a systems integrator that's helping them on the deployment, they come to our community, which is hundreds and hundreds of people that are fluent in Mojloop. And lo and behold, this community is raising hand to help them to address their questions, to help them with the maintenance and enhancement of the project. So we actually have a product council that collects feedback from customers about the roadmap, the requirements. So again, traditionally something you're quite familiar in an open source project, but something that they almost need to experience before they really realize how important this is and how this really frees them up from the vendor lock-in that they've been experiencing. So central banks and governments in particular have been our focus in Africa, Southeast Asia and the like. And what we've found is that they are very keen on investing in digital infrastructure projects. And they want to be involved in the discussions on how these solutions roll out. In some cases, we're working with the Bank of Tanzania. The Bank of Tanzania is defining the rules and the implementation of Mojloop in country. And then they're plugging in 40 or 50 other digital financial service providers that will have the customer-facing relationship. But across all of our discussions thus far, those central banks are critically important. They're the regulatory bodies that ensure this can happen in their country. And so they are very, very much part of the conversation as we do a Mojloop deployment. So I want to switch to CBDCs, which was part of the topic for this session today. As you all know, there's the interest in CBDCs worldwide is very high. I can't wait to see the slide updated for 2021. I can't take credit for having prepared it. But even in the last two weeks, I think it was Nairobi we saw that had just announced a new CBDC initiative. But as you see, it's across the world, there's interest in central bank digital currencies. And why? CBDC reduces the reliance on banks and other financial institutions. And it can be a medium that brings in those underserved citizens and some folks would say, well, that's competitive with the banks. The banks aren't serving these folks today. So it could be a potential opportunity, but in many cases it might be just a bypass. The fact that they can't get a bank account doesn't mean that they can't possibly trade with CBDCs. It can be universally accessible and widely used. One of the things that we see in markets where there are a lot of migrants or refugees is having government to people payments, GDP implemented via CBDC will be a very compelling scenario. Imagine you're in a refugee camp. You don't want to be holding onto a lot of cash. You do have your phone. There are ways to distribute aid payments via CBDC that would reduce those fears and concerns with trading in cash. And, you know, while cash is still king in many of the markets that we're talking to, another reason why CBDCs are of interest is in addition to aid payments and distributing out to the citizens different types of payments from the government, cash is unsafe. Not only can you be robbed of your cash, but in times of COVID, fewer and fewer people want to process cash, want to handle cash. So that's another factor that is driving government's interest in rolling out CBDCs. So what's the Mojloop Foundation doing about it? Okay, so we've got the Mojloop project, an open source project. We've been working on that for about four years now. And we have a handful of deployments that are underway in Tanzania, Mawali, Orange and MTN have an instance that they're testing out in Egypt and other countries. As you can imagine, the sales cycle on this type of deployment is pretty long and complex, particularly when you add in the fact that many of these countries need investment. They need grants to move these projects forward. So in parallel to that, the monetary authority of Singapore came to us and said, we like the rails that you're designing here. We like the fact that you're open source. We'd like to work on some initiatives to move CBDCs forward in developing countries. So Singapore obviously demonstrates great leadership and innovation in the regulatory space. It's not for the benefit of their citizens that they're doing this, it's for the broader populace. I mean, even when you think about currency exchanges, they have a lot of individuals from like the Philippines that are guest workers in Singapore, they wanna send money home. And that requires a cash in, a currency conversion. Again, the transaction fees just start racking up. So they came to us and said, let's start working on this, focusing first on wholesale and then longer term potentially on retail. In parallel, Mass launched a retail CBDC hackathon and a challenge this year in partnership with Asian Development Bank, the IMF and many other large global institutions. There were 300 submissions, 15 finalists and of the 15 finalists, three of them are using Mojaloop. And what we did was we created a sandbox for folks to kick the tires and play with Mojaloop. We're using Apex. I don't know if any of you are familiar with Apex? Yes? No? That came out of collaborations with Mass and other Asian based organizations and it's a platform for testing out APIs. So we have created a sandbox on Apex for folks to use Mojaloop and three of the finalists in the global challenge actually used Mojaloop as part of their underpinnings, including the ANSI Banking Group in Australia, Soromatsu and Switzerland and the Standard Charter Bank. So it was reaffirming that our technology is sound and that it does have relevancy for CBDC. But what we need to do now is really define this project more specifically. So I am actually getting ready to hire individuals in Singapore that are gonna run our CBDC initiative. It's completely open source and transparent. Anyone can join the project and participate in the project. And there's three areas that we're gonna focus on. Domestic clearing with settlement in CBDC using Mojaloop as the central clearing system with settlement via external CBDC. Domestic issuing and clearing of CBDC, providing account-based wholesale CBDC and cross-border payments. Test the use of wholesale CBDC with multiple currencies and disparate networks. If you were to ask me for more detail on those three bullets I'd say when I hire my first person that person will be glad to answer that question. So it's boring new project. Just talked about it earlier this week at the Singapore Fintech Festival. So as I mentioned, I'm hiring a director to lead the project, a technical lead to lead the technical aspects of the project and we'll open the doors and welcome any and all that wanna participate and collaborate on that. So there are some of you here at the conference that I've already talked to that are interested in this. Again, our focus is wholesale right now. Couple of years from now hopefully we'll pivot to retail but right now we really wanna make sure that we address the needs on the wholesale side. So one of the things that we're gonna be doing in 2022 is starting pilot projects. So we're really keen to pick a couple of countries where we test out some of these technologies. We'll also be hosting financial inclusion workshops and hackathons. So Mass sponsored the retail hackathon that happened this summer. We will do joint hackathons with Mass that are focused on horizontal. And then we will also be developing a CBDC toolkit. Again, we're gonna be working with Mass and other experts in this area to help those developing countries roll out CBDC. So as far as the Mojo Foundation is concerned, we really wanna build out this ecosystem that benefits everyone. As I mentioned, we don't have a relationship with the end user, but our work hopefully has an impact on their inclusion in the financial sector. We're very keen on the merchants being able to tap into our rails, governments, central banks, and fintechs. So there's plenty of opportunity. And while in some of these developing countries, the governments may not have the funds and on hand to fund these projects, there are many philanthropic organizations and NGOs out there that are writing grants for these types of deployments. We're starting a deployment in Rwanda right now that there's been funds allocated to that from external parties. So we're not asking people to do pro bono work on the implementation and deployment. Obviously, open source, we wanna see people contributing, but when it comes to the hard work, not that open source development isn't hard, but when it comes to the work of integrating and implementing these projects, we recognize that systems integrators and other solution providers need to be at the table and need to tap into those funds. They can't just allocate precious resources to do that kind of work for free. So there is money in the system to help bootstrap these implementation projects, but it's a more complicated sale cycle than a traditional sale cycle in a more developed market because there's other players that we have to bring into the deals to secure those funds. As far as the community is concerned, we currently have well over 1,000 participants and we're growing that base. The Mojulu project, the open source project actually started about four years ago when the Gates Foundation fund specific companies like Coil, Ripple, ModusBox and others to write the base code. So over the course of those three and a half, four years, this developer community started to grow. I was fortunate to be able to meet with them a few times on the ground in Africa before COVID erupted, but we have a really passionate group of individuals that are supporting this initiative and it's really very distributed around the world. We obviously, Africa is our focal point for deployments, other developing countries like Myanmar, Philippines and Indonesia are also important to us, but the community is much broader than that. The community that's contributing is literally all over the world. So what I've done is kind of giving you enough to be dangerous when talking about Mojulu. If you wanna learn more about what is Mojulu, what kind of services does it offer, how does it deliver instant interoperable payments, I'd encourage you to download our executive briefing white paper, which kind of goes to a much more detail than what I've provided here today. And then we welcome you to participate in our community work. If you are interested in the project, it's all of our repositories are up on GitHub. We have a pretty active Slack channel and of course we're always looking for new members that want to participate in our governance and operations of the foundation itself. We're young, we were launched as a nonprofit last May. We have a small team distributed around the world, but we're always looking for more people to participate, provide input and engagement. So with that, I think I have a little time for questions. Any from the room? In the US? No, not at this time. Really all of our focus has been Africa and Southeast Asia. Oh, I see one up there. We're coin agnostic. We don't care what flows through our pipes. So what we want to make sure, again, open interoperable. So whether it be crypto, CBDC, or any type of currency, we're the pipes. Jim's comments. It's a big shift. As I mentioned, cash is king right now, but there are trusted relationships in market. So for example, as I mentioned, MTN and Arash, big mobile network operators in Africa. And what they've done is rolled out services that allow all citizens to send money abroad. So getting people accustomed to very specific use cases that are meaningful to them, because you find it's not just Singapore and Philippines, there's the Hong Kong Philippines, Myanmar, and places where there's either large refugee or migrant populations. Being able to knit together their transactions is a very discreet exercise that can really reduce cost for them, those transaction costs. But that's part of the remit of the MTNs and the oranges and the folks that have the relationship with that individual. But if we can again reduce the transaction costs and increase the interoperability, we can start shifting people's behavior in that regard. Sometimes the reticence to use digital right now is the lack of interoperability and the cost. So we need to address both. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that if you'd do it again. It's early, in part because we only have a handful of deployments that are underway. But as I said, as they get indoctrinated in our community, I know Mawali in particular was one, that's a joint venture between Orange and MTN. They had specific requirements, so they did some development and now want to give it back. So I think it takes them a little while to get comfortable. It used to be we had face-to-face community meetings four times a year, so there was an opportunity to bring those customers in and have them meet the people that are working on the code base and strengthen those bonds and a sense of contribution. The other thing that we're working with folks that are granting funds for infrastructure projects to ensure that when they grant funds, they stipulate that if there's any new development it needs to be given back to the community. Because these big aid organizations would rather not fund the same thing over and over and over again. So that's a good carrot or an incentive for people to contribute back. But it's still a bit early. And again, they're understanding the open source way is not as sophisticated as the folks in this room. So it's a learning and experience. I find myself repeating messages that I used to give 10 years ago here in the States. So it'll take some time, questions. My email is p-hunter at mojo-loop.io. Probably should have put it on the slide. But I welcome you to reach out to me. And if you have any questions or comments or thoughts, we're happy to have them. All right, thank you. Thank you.