Mifos Participates in ISO 20022 Hackathon for Cross-Border Payments

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This past week, we had the pleasure of participating in the ISO 20022 Hackathon for Cross-Border Payments hosted by the BIS Innovation Hub & Swift. Thanks to Istvan Molnar and the team from DPC along with Godfrey Kutumela for their participation. 

While our submission, Enabling Last-Mile Cross-Border Payments through Mojaloop and Mifos Payment Hub, wasn’t selected as a winner, pulling it together helped us further crystallize our positioning and long-term vision for how our end to end open source stack with open APIs at the infrastructure and application layers can fuel vibrant digital economies. Our articulation showed how far our Payment Hub EE and our integration with Mojaloop has come since we embarked on the initial project led by DIAL. 

At the heart of our solution for the hackathon was our open source Payment Hub EE which provides the bridge and orchestration engine which transforms messages from the ISO 20022 standard to the Mojaloop format, providing an API-driven architecture that can use ISO 20022 protocols in collaboration with mobile money for last-mile delivery of payments.  

 

Our demonstration showcased a remittance flow from a Payer on a SEPA Instant network into the Payee at a bank in Africa that participates in both networks. From there, using the rich data of ISO 20022 standard and the interoperability of the Mojaloop API, one can envision advanced use cases like for-purpose remittances, merchant, biller and MFI requests to pay, and bulk G2P payments with recourse and confirmation to the beneficiary. 

 

Our congratulations go out to the Mojaloop team that was one of the three winners of the hackathon. We’re eager to see how this recognition of Mojaloop can help accelerate their efforts to harmonize the Mojaloop API protocols with the data-rich ISO 20022 messaging standards. 

Payment Hub EE is under active development and we look forward to adoption and contribution across the Mifos, Mojaloop and ISO 20022 communities. There is great potential in building upon this open stack and utilizing these globally adopted APIs and standards. With Mifos, Fineract, Mojaloop, and OpenG2P all recognized by the Digital Public Goods Alliance as foundational digital public goods for the Financial Inclusion Community of Practice, we’re eager to identify organizations that would like to be a part of a reference implementation of these building blocks.