Carel van Wyk, MoneyBadger

For the last decade, there have been promises that, one day, it will be as simple to send money as it is to send an email. Well, the world is still waiting. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of people all over the globe working on payment technology. They’re tinkering with different parts of the payment ecosystem, but most will converge around the need for simplicity, reliability and predictability of payments. They will probably agree that payments should cost almost nothing, and happen in real-time. And all of them will surely concur that payments should play a part in improving financial inclusion. This story looks at just two players in this vast ecosystem: the Interledger Foundation, which wants to establish an open payments standard through its Interledger Protocol, and MoneyBadger, a local crypto payments solution provider. Where they converge is that both want to increase financial inclusion.

Cryptocurrency, and bitcoin in particular, seemed, at least at first, to promise a better payment system, as well as more inclusion. Here was a method of sending cash between peers without touching the banking system. But, at least with the original bitcoin blockchain, transactions are said to take too long, and there have been scalability issues. However, much work has been done on the technology, and solutions such as the Lightning Network can now scale to millions of transactions a second and cost very little. Crypto has become a massive asset class, worth well over $3trn, but it also has legions of detractors, among them US economist Paul Krugman, and Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator.