If you weren’t able to attend July’s Mojaloop Community Event, you missed some exciting updates, fun demos, and presentations from various members of the open source community. After each quarterly meeting, we enjoy sharing the progress updates that our team is most excited about as the program transitions into the next increment. As members of the core team that built Mojaloop, it is especially encouraging to see the momentum that both Mojaloop and the community are gaining.
About the Event
Mojaloop is in its fourth phase of development – “Going Live!” – and now enters the 11th program increment (PI-11). July’s convening highlighted the building of the Community around Mojaloop along with the rapid evolution and productionization of the ecosystem. A notable difference in the agenda was the emphasis on business-related sessions during the first two days. This comes as a result of Mojaloop’s maturity as a production-ready solution, Mowali going live with Forex services, and a significant rise in interest from governments and other organizations.
Once again, more than 200 participants from various organizations around the world presented updates, new developments, and workshopped objectives and items to focus on throughout the next program increment. Besides the ModusBox team, participants represented a long list of organizations that included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Coil, Crosslake, Deloitte, GSMA, HiPiPo, Glenbrook, Google, Microsoft, Mifos, Mojaloop Foundation, Mowali, Ssnapp, Sybrin, Virtual, and others. You can download and view all of the presentations from the Mojaloop GitHub site.
Here are some of the updates we’re excited to share from the July 2020 Mojaloop Convening.
Event Highlights
Mowali’s implementation update
The biggest highlight from the event was Mowali’s announcement that its implementation of Mojaloop was now live in production. This marks the first commercial instance of Mojaloop to go live and is a major milestone for the program. The community was excited to hear that Mowali has gone live with cross border foreign exchange (FOREX) services and that they are ready to go live with local currency services when authorized by the relevant central bank authorities. During the update, Mowali highlighted the importance of managing versioning and upgrades seamlessly and the value of a good communication process. According to Mowali’s road map, the company’s focus moving forward will be on cross-currency transactions, onboarding DFSPs at scale, and refining various operational processes.
Google Pay’s update on Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISP)
Google Pay’s presence and involvement in the Mojaloop ecosystem is exciting because it will accelerate the adoption of digital payments. During the event, representatives presented the completion of a well-defined relationship between end-users, PISPs, and their DFSPs. Features that support end-to-end transactions using PISPs are currently being developed and will go a long way towards broadening the base of users, schemes, and FSPs participating in a Mojaloop real-time payment network.
ModusBox community contributions
The ModusBox team revisited various contributions to the Mojaloop OSS Community including a Foreign Exchange Provider (FXP) and Treasury Management Function (TMF). We also presented on the evolution of the “onboarding journey” as we continue to build community capacity that supports hub operators, financial institutions, and their system integrators that are trying to onboard Mojaloop hubs. Our team unveiled a Payment Manager for Mojaloop designed as a production-grade financial service solution for rapidly onboarding financial institutions and includes every control and process required to support a modern payment service. We have seen significant traction with our Payment Manager approach in Myanmar where we are rapidly onboarding FIs into a UNCDF-lead financial inclusion proof of concept. This project connects microfinance institutions to banks and wallets for loan repayments.
Updates to the Mojaloop core
The Bulk Payments use case, which enables the distribution of “social payments,” is an important function that can benefit the world greatly during these trying times. The Mojaloop core team has implemented and demonstrated Bulk Payments as specified in the Mojaloop API Definition v1.0. With this use case, the implementation of all basic use cases in version v1.0 of the Mojaloop FSP Interoperability API Specification is now complete. Our partners are working with governments to further explore this use case during the global pandemic.
During PI-10, the team evaluated a proof of concept exploring a new approach to perform transactions and ledger entries. After presenting the findings, the Mojaloop community voted to pursue the method further to gain more data in PI-11.
The core team also presented the new features introduced as part of the v1.1 release from last May. This feature release was exciting as it indicates the community’s commitment to making system improvements rapidly. Check out our blog from June for more details about this release.
What Happens Next?
Program Increment 11 will focus on objectives around ISO 20022 support, PISP enhancements, exploring more scalable architecture for the Mojaloop Core, streamlining testing & QA, additional settlement models, and security & versioning enhancements.
Mojaloop was built to help overcome the challenges that prevent the financial inclusion of 1.7 billion people who cannot gain access to critical financial services that will improve their lives. If you would like to join us on this mission, you can get started on our Mojaloop page. There, you’ll find several links to various resources, including our Mojaloop Partner Program.
You can also join the Mojaloop community on Slack.
