2024 Summit Sessions

The Next 30 Years of Transaction Processing

In the last 7 years, the “transactions of everyday life” have increased 100x to 1,000x, even 10,000x across several sectors (e.g. cloud computing, energy, real time payments). Yet popular transaction databases are 20-30 years old, and even newer cloud databases are circa 2012, designed for a different workload and scale. Research into maximizing durability (and therefore availability) has advanced since 2018 (e.g. storage fault-tolerance, high frequency trading architectures, deterministic simulation testing) but can be hard to retrofit. At the same time, extracting transaction performance from general purpose database designs is becoming more and more expensive. How can we reset transaction infrastructure for the next 30 years? To adapt and apply specialization to unlock three orders of magnitude more performance? How can we evolve our engineering methodologies for tighter tolerances and stricter safety standards? Join us to look at what the world needs, and how these needs invent and predict the future of transaction processing, in the context of micro transactions and Interledger.

Unbanked in America: Exploring the Financial Divide

The proposed session, which will be led by the documentary's director, Victoria Coker, will delve into the complex issues that contribute to the significant number of unbanked and underbanked individuals in the United States, specifically people in Mississippi, New Orleans, and the NYC Metro area, and how these factors highly impact Black and Brown communities. The panel will begin with an introduction by Victoria Coker, who will provide an overview of the documentary's key themes and objectives. Attendees will then view the documentary trailer, offering a glimpse into the stories and insights captured during the film's production. Following the trailer, the discussion will feature select participants from the documentary who are actively working to support unbanked populations across the country. These participants include community leaders, financial literacy educators, tech innovators, and non-profit representatives. Each panelist will bring a unique perspective and firsthand experience in addressing the barriers to financial inclusion and promoting economic empowerment. The panel aims to illuminate the multifaceted challenges and innovative solutions being implemented to increase financial inclusion. It will provide a platform for discussing best practices, sharing success stories, and exploring collaborative approaches to foster greater financial inclusion. Panel Objectives: - Highlight the core factors contributing to the unbanked and underbanked populations in the United States. - Showcase real-world examples and success stories from across the country. - Foster dialogue on innovative solutions and collaborative efforts to tackle the problem. - Engage with summit attendees to inspire and inform them about their work in the field.

Cross-border payments and standards

Discusses how different protocols can interact with each other to collaborate on making cross-border payments cheaper, simpler and available to everybody

Existing Ecosystem Approaches to Inclusive and Accessible Digital Financial Services

In today’s landscape of increasingly riskier digital experiences and the recent Crowdstrike related IT global outage, universal access to digital financial services is seen as a critical infrastructural resource. Taking a decentralized approach that incorporates ethical design principles to safeguard the privacy, security, and autonomy of users is vital, that the Interledger Protocol seeks to facilitate globally. By prioritising transparency, accountability, and consent in eminent aspects of development of digital financial services (DFS), we ensure alignment with human rights principles and international standards, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Drawing from a range of real-world examples and grounded in experiential knowledge from open source evangelists, this panel will illustrate the diverse use cases of the development and dissemination of digital public goods that support financial inclusion that facilitate access to financial services for underserved communities, while carefully addressing potential harms and respecting human rights. Recognizing the global nature of the DFS, our approach takes into account regional differences and cultural contexts from regions with internet blackouts, shutdowns and censorship across Africa, Asia and Europe. The Interledger Protocol seeks to facilitate open, standard, and interoperable payment systems across the globe. The session discusses the very crux of this mission – the development and deployment usable, accessible and secure technical standards and protocols that pave way for decentralised digital infrastructure – by offering a nuanced view of adoption that can help shape the community’s strategy and ensure efforts align with the broader mission of inclusivity, community, and Open Tech. This panel will also address the need for increased investment in resilient and trustworthy digital infrastructure that support the delivery of financial services, especially in rural and remote areas, among traditionally-excluded communities, and among low-income and/or disability communities, elderly people. The absence of of performing regular security, accessibility audits and privacy enhancing technologies as distinct categories in many grant program descriptions, despite the crucial role they play in the ecosystems, is a key to a long term sustainable ecosystem — especially when these systems are managing digital money and assets. The adoption of secure decentralized solutions becomes not just advantageous, but essential for robust, reliable, and resilient operations in our interconnected ILP ecosystem.

Getting the Money to Public Interest Technologists Building A Feminist Internet

This is an interactive session that brings together technologists, and digital rights defenders to map out contextual accessible financial service challenges while identifying possible inclusive technology solutions to advance financial access within the technology and human rights space. A significant aspect of Team Community’s work with digital rights defenders includes providing equity support to marginalised communities of colour, Africans, women, LGBTQ groups and indigenous people. Getting funding to most of these communities has been challenging, posing a structural barrier to accessing network and security resources. For the most part, there is no way to get the money to the communities that need them. Financial pathways have either been blocked or have extra layers of difficulty. Thus , increasing marginalities within digital rights defenders who work at the grassroots in the global majority. The session’s goal is to collectively brainstorm and potentially answer the following questions: 1. What are the key challenges and barriers digital rights defenders in the global majority experience with receiving funding that advance their work? 2. What resources and efforts are needed to improve financial inclusivity?

Empowering Women: Bridging the Gender Gap in Digital Financial Inclusion

The importance of gender-sensitive approaches in promoting digital financial inclusion. It will highlight the unique barriers faced by women in accessing financial services and explore strategies for empowering women economically through innovative digital solutions.

Building Trust and Advancing Open Payments in Africa’s Regulatory Ecosystem

Fostering Trust and Advancing Open Payments in Africa's Regulatory Ecosystem panel explores strategies for fostering trust and advancing open payments within Africa’s FinTech ecosystem. Our focus will be on shaping inclusive financial compliance frameworks that can bridge gaps and facilitate broader participation in the global financial system.

Competition and financial inclusion: competing or complementing goals in DPI & interoperability

Interoperability in the payments ecosystem and the implementation of a digital public infrastructure (DPI) for digital payments have the potential of fostering two separate goals: market competition and financial inclusion. Nevertheless, depending on the authority advancing each measure and the legal mandate it has been entrusted with, those objectives could be regarded as competing (one is considered, and the other one is neglected) or complementing (both are taken into account, even though one might be more prevalent). We analyze how these two targets are considered by antitrust authorities, the central bank, and other relevant authorities in Brazil, India, Peru and Chile. These countries from the Global South share a similar path in terms of legal measures adopted in the digital payments ecosystem consisting of voluntary/ mandatory interoperability. However, some differences also exist, such as the industry-led ownership of India's United Payments Interface (UPI), whereas the Brazilian DPI is owned by its central bank. Furthermore, the countries are at different stages of implementation. India is seen as a pioneer in the field with its UPI being launched in 2016, while Brazil’s PIX has been active since 2020. Peru’s Central Bank first ordered mandatory interoperability in payments in 2022, and this year reached an agreement with the international arm of the National Payments Corporation of Payments, which runs India's UPI, to deploy a similar system in Peru. Chile seems to be at the beginning of a long path, where the Supreme Court declared the mandatory nature of interoperability this year and the Commission for Financial Markets introduced new regulations on the matter, following intense discussions (some still pending) with competition authorities. A number of actors play a role in pursuing the dual goals of furthering financial inclusion and market competition. This may include national competition authorities, central banks, government departments and industry associations. The institutional arrangements between these actors and coordination among them is paramount to providing predictability to all economic actors in the payment ecosystem and to the seamless attainment of the public interest goals of payment DPIs.

Empowering Emerging Economies: Mojaloop's Role in Inclusive Financial Access

Imagine a world where microledgers empower the 1.4 billion underserved in emerging economies to gain access to financial services, and a payment hub facilitates lower-cost instant fund transfers across nations' participating banks. This presentation will unveil how Mojaloop is turning this vision into reality, revolutionizing the accessibility of financial services in emerging economies. With national deployments in Rwanda, Mexico, and the Philippines, a regional deployment across the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and promising proofs of concept underway in five diverse nations, Mojaloop has been actively expanding its reach. Given that the Interledger Protocol is a key part of Mojaloop’s tech stack, through Mojaloop, participants on the Interledger Network can access entire countries and regions. Mojaloop also empowers hub operators with instant, inclusive payment systems (IIPS) to connect thrift banks, rural banks, and microfinance institutions - ones currently excluded from payment networks due to high switching and on-ramp costs. Furthermore, the presentation will explore how Mojaloop-enabled IIPS allows financial institutions to competitively price instant transactions, thus advancing inclusive financial access. Additionally, we'll illuminate Mojaloop's role as a catalyst for the emergence of new market players, enabling the aggressive development and marketing of innovative payment services to both consumers and merchants.

Trust-based banking technical session

Undocumented people are excluded from many governmental services and cannot open a bank account in the Netherlands. This exclusion becomes more severe each day, as it is nearly impossible to survive with only cash. Shops and services in the city are rapidly moving towards accepting only card payments. We have now been granted funding from Interledger, together our partner Here to Support, and with the support of the Municipality of Amsterdam and various partners in the Netherlands.