From April 14-16, 2025, the Mojaloop Community convened in Accra, Ghana, bringing together financial inclusion leaders from 24 countries. The event drew DFSPs, regulators, and private-sector partners to exchange practical insights on building scalable IIPS.
Discussions explored Mojaloop’s latest milestones and the road ahead. Attendees participated in panels, tech demos, and breakout sessions designed to share ideas and surface solutions.
Recordings of all sessions are available on the Mojaloop Foundation’s YouTube channel. Watch the full playlist to catch up on everything from technical deep dives to high-level talks about topics like digital sovereignty or usability.
As an added bonus, Julie Guetta, Mojaloop Foundation’s technical solutions lead, put together some great posts on LinkedIn that provided her takeaways from each day. Each post includes a video — be sure to watch them because they include a discussion with a financial inclusion insider.
- Read Julie Guetta’s takeaways from Day 1 >
- Read Julie Guetta’s takeaways from Day 2 >
- Read Julie Guetta’s takeaways from Day 3 >
Highlights from the Convening
Here are a few of the key sessions from the event.
1. Cracking the FX & Settlement Challenge: Lowering Costs in Illiquid Currency Markets
Led by Julie Guetta (Mojaloop Foundation), Jedidah Ndebele (COMESA Clearing House), Barry Cooper (Cenfri), and Mike Truter (SWIFT)
This session examined the new cross-border settlement initiative through the lens of the Level One Project principle of minimal transaction costs — ideally just a few pennies per transaction. However, when foreign exchange (FX) involves illiquid currencies, reaching that goal becomes significantly more complex.
To help resolve this, the Mojaloop Foundation is partnering with several organizations to explore solutions that can lower both FX and settlement costs. Current workstreams include:
- Workstream 1: Using stablecoins in place of the traditional correspondent banking network.
- Workstream 2: Advancing insights from Bank for International Settlements (BIS) projects.
- Workstream 3: Exploring the feasibility of launching a Mojaloop-backed stablecoin, anchored to a basket of African fiat currencies.
- Workstream 4: Enhancing existing FX and settlement mechanisms — for example, improving access to correspondent banking networks.
The presentation centered on a roundtable discussion that surfaced a range of perspectives and practical ideas.
2. Accelerating Mojaloop on TigerBeetle
Led by Lewis Daly (TigerBeetle) and Michael Richards (Mojaloop Foundation)
TigerBeetle is a financial transactions database built to power instant payments, designed to be up to a thousand times faster than traditional databases. It’s well suited for the high volume of low-value transactions expected as IIPSs in developing economies scale up.
The session began with a demonstration of TigerBeetle’s Racer — a video game–style visualization that gave the audience a vivid sense of the database’s performance advantage. In the demo, Lewis compared Mojaloop v17 running on a MySQL database versus TigerBeetle. MySQL delivered 70 to 80 transactions per second, with each transaction taking between four and nine seconds. TigerBeetle maintained similar latency but processed transactions 27 times faster.
Next, Michael presented on Mojaloop accounting considerations, explaining how payment processing and settlement function in detail. This session was especially valuable for those seeking a deeper technical understanding of Mojaloop’s internal mechanics.
3. Mojaloop Release v17
Led by Sam Kummary (Mojaloop Foundation)
In this session, Sam, our technical director, gave the audience a guided overview of the new features in Mojaloop v17. He walked through the release process, highlighted recent security upgrades and quality improvements, and shared the roadmap for upcoming releases.
He began with a brief history of Mojaloop releases, tracing its evolution from the original reference implementation to the latest version. He also broke down the architecture of the platform, offering a clear explanation of its core capabilities.
Longstanding Mojaloop Community member Vijay Kumar Guthi followed with a demo of a cross-border payment in a production-grade environment, showcasing the new FX, inter-scheme functionality, and ISO 20022 messaging.
Sam then reviewed the release notes, including successful test results from GitHub and the upgrade strategy guide — which outlines how users can update their Mojaloop instances.
This session was especially useful for those seeking deeper insight into the Mojaloop platform: what it can do, how it works, and where it’s headed next.
Read the v17 Release Announcement >
4. Product Council: Addressing Challenges and Proposing Changes
Led by Paul Makin (Mojaloop Foundation)
In this session, Paul provided a candid look at the challenges facing the Mojaloop Product Council and proposed a set of improvements for group consideration. For an open source Community like Mojaloop’s, the effectiveness of the Product Council is essential.
The current issues include a focus on short-term product requirements and meetings centered on workstream updates rather than strategic direction. To address these, Paul recommended refocusing Product Council meetings around three core areas: knowledge building, streamlined workstream oversight, and support for roadmap planning and product ideation.
These changes aim to strengthen alignment with community needs, improve long-term roadmap relevance, and enhance decision-making and prioritization — ultimately enabling a more strategic and focused Product Council.
Thanks to All Who Attended
We’re grateful to everyone who joined us in Accra — whether in person or virtually — and we look forward to continuing the conversation as we work together to advance inclusive, interoperable payments systems.
