Author: Phil Green, Technical Solutions Consultant, Zambia

There are now five Zambian and Malawian systems integration firms with proven ability to build integrations to the Mojaloop open-source payment platform. Together, these fintechs proved that there is strong in-country talent for developing nationally owned inclusive instant payment systems (IIPS) and other components of their financial infrastructure using Mojaloop’s foundational capabilities.

At the Mojaloop Community Meeting in Nairobi in late March 2024, each of the five Zambian and Malawian companies demonstrated working uses cases based on the Mojaloop platform. Impressively, these highly passionate teams developed these systems in approximately three months using volunteer time.

  1. iZyane (Lusaka, Zambia) demonstrated in-store merchant payments using request-to-pay. They showed how merchants could place an order on a customer’s behalf using the customer’s phone number, at which point the customer would receive a push notification to confirm and pay for the purchase.
  2. ProBASE (Lusaka, Zambia) showcased person-to-person payments with SmartPay, an application sitting on top of existing core banking systems. Businesses could use the system to do bulk transfers to pay employees, as well as different types of tax payments with one system.
  3. NetOne (Lusaka, Zambia) provided a walkthrough of bulk disbursements to a mobile wallet or bank account. Their demo featured three user types: a maker, a checker, and an approver, each with unique IDs for security. Their system can upload a CSV with the users, amounts and mobile or bank numbers for faster execution.
  4. Sparc Systems (Malawi, with an office in Lusaka) offered a tour of their alias registration system to support government-to-person (G2P) use cases. Their beneficiary registration portal (BRP) was integrated with MOSIP and Mojaloop to enable the seamless association of accounts for G2P transactions.
  5. IMoSys (Blantyre and Lilongwe, Malawi) created a system to support in-person customer-initiated merchant payments using a QR code. The workflow began with a merchant generating a QR code for an order, which was then scanned by the user to start the payment process.

These companies are highly skilled and thriving members of Malawi and Zambia’s tech ecosystem, and thanks to the Mojaloop Accelerator Program, these teams have all received the training they need to be able to work with the robust Mojaloop framework, which includes a state of the art clearing and settlement system, cutting edge cybersecurity, and know your customer (KYC) capabilities.

What is Mojaloop?   

Mojaloop is an open source clearing and settlement system for inclusive instant payment systems (IIPS). It was designed to enable financial inclusion for everyone, especially the unbanked, by enabling instant payments via mobile phones. Because Mojaloop is available license-free, it dramatically lowers the cost to deploy and maintain IIPSs that include mobile wallets, small rural banks, microfinance institutions, and other financial service providers that accommodate users at the last mile.

The platform is maintained and expanded by the 1,400+ member community, which follows an ongoing product roadmap for new features. Mojaloop has been recognized as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.

Benefits of Using Mojaloop for National Payment Systems   

Benefits to national systems include the following.

Achieve Sovereignty Over Financial Systems 

Maintaining control over national payment systems empowers governments and central banks to ensure maintenance and upgrades can’t be suspended for political reasons and that their own regulations prevail. This includes the preservation of data privacy for its citizens according to local values.

Avoid Vendor Lock-in   

Because Mojaloop is open source and available for anyone to use license-free, systems operators aren’t tied to any one vendor for maintenance and upgrades. If one vendor becomes unsatisfactory, operators are free to put future contracts out to tender.

Cost Savings   

When firms are hired to build national payment systems from outside the country, the price is often much higher than it would be if sourced in-country. In some cases, nations rely on loans to pay for the systems, which means additional debt that must be paid. The Mojaloop system is available free of licensing, leaving more funds available for creation of the specific payment system. Because there is no vendor lock-in, system development, support and upgrades can be contracted to providers who charge fees in local currency with more affordable rates.

Nurture Local Tech Ecosystems   

With a Mojaloop-based system, knowledge as well as funds are retained in-country. The funds spent on building, maintaining and expanding the payment system go right back into the local economy, and enable local companies to expand their capabilities for better competitiveness in the international market.

Flexibility and Adaptability   

Local firms are better able to comprehend the need to fulfill local use cases. International firms may be less inclined to expand a system to meet a particular local need if they don’t think they can sell the capability to other clients.

Find Out More About the Mojaloop Accelerator Program  

The Mojaloop Accelerator Program pairs experienced System Integrators with ones who have been through the free online training program but are not experienced with Mojaloop. Participants gain the ability to rapidly create and deploy working systems and have access to fast answers if they need them.

To learn more about the Mojaloop Accelerator program in Zambia, email me at pgreen@mojaloop.io or message me on LinkedIn.