OUTDIA UPDATE - Digital Cash Q4/2022

The interest for #DigitalCash outside India took off in Q4. In addition to #SoutheastAsia Crunchfish have now expanded operations to both #Africa and the #Caribbean. In Africa, Crunchfish are supporting the Central Bank of Nigeria with their CBDC #eNaira implementation and joined a pivotal telecom partnership to deliver mobile payments with offline payments capabilities.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, became the first African nation to launch a CBDC – the eNaira – 25 October 2021. To increase financial inclusion and add additional use cases to the eNaira, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is in the process of evaluating offline payments. Consequently, Crunchfish and CBN entered into a Development and Demonstration Agreement for a Proof-of-Concept of Crunchfish Digital Cash offline payments with the eNaira. Crunchfish have delivered Digital Cash for iOS and Android and are supporting CBN throughout the evaluation process. CBN will integrate Digital Cash into the eNaira wallet and backend to fully evaluate the user experience and use cases in a potential commercial deployment.

Crunchfish joined a new pivotal telecom partnership with?Socio ApS, a Danish management and investment company. The objective of this partnership is to enable telecom?infrastructure across Africa to fill critical gaps by enabling mobile services with disruptive technologies, and to provide significantly better cost structures, use cases and quality. The mindset is Anything-as-a-service to make it possible for companies and entrepreneurs to enter the mobile telecom industry with very little CAPEX. The objective is to enable mobile service operations in Africa and other emerging markets.

Latin America & the Caribbean

Mobile payments are critical to enable people to participate in the digital economy. Cash is still king in #LatinAmerica and the Caribbean (LAC), despite the demand for digital transactions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. To impact the lives of most citizens — especially financially excluded and underserved people — require inclusive, affordable and easy-to-use mobile payments services. #OfflinePayment is crucial for successful deployments of both commercial mobile payment services and Central Bank Digital Currencies (#CBDC), as internet availability is undeveloped in the LAC region.

The LAC region is an early adopter of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). #TheBahamas was the first country in the world to officially roll out CBDC with the Sand Dollar in October 2020. This was followed by #DCash in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union 2021 and Jamaica’s JAM-DEX 2022. During Q4 Crunchfish entered a partnership with Money Square in Jamaica to address opportunities within both commercial mobile payment services and CBDC in this interesting region. Money Square will actively promote Crunchfish Digital Cash as an agent, with an initial focus on Jamaica and then address the rest of the Caribbean and select countries in Latin America.

“I believe that Digital Cash is about to forever change the way we do transactions and business in this Digital Age. The Caribbean and Latin America stand to benefit from this revolutionary technology as many of our nationals live in rural areas where there are internet connectivity issues, and local banks tend to have frequent service interruptions and scheduled maintenances, which all affect reliable processing of payments. Thanks to Crunchfish Digital Cash these issues will be eliminated and the future of payments for the Caribbean and Latin America will be bright.” says Maurice K.P. Sinclair, CEO Money Square

Southeast Asia

Co-operation with V-Key - Stronger with V-OS and #Sirius continue around sales and marketing in Southeast Asia with positive developments. V-Key is coordinating the project in Vietnam with one of the leading #ewallets. Progress has been slow due to regulations and pending approval from Vietnam Central Bank, but a pilot is expected to start mid-2023.?

Crunchfish’s focus in Southeast Asia during 2023 will be on the VIP-countries – Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Vietnam has modern communication technology and a government policy that favors a cashless society. In the?Philippines there is a strong government push towards digital payments and financial inclusion. The central bank, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (#BSP), expects at least 50 percent of payments to shift to digital by 2023. And in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, the economy has boomed dramatically, giving rise to a connected population, tech startups and steadily improving living standards.?