Real-time Interoperable Payment System

Demonstration Events

 

December 2019

WOCCU joined its national credit union association members and key participants in the Philippines and Indonesia, in the second week of December 2019, to demo a real-time interoperable payment system for credit unions. The events featured a live demonstration of how a shared real-time interoperable payment system could allow credit unions to better serve their existing members and acquire new members more effectively and efficiently.

The WOCCU team and its partners - Paysys Global and ModusBox - have been working with credit unions in both countries to design use cases, identify and on-board select participants, integrate their core banking systems to the demo payment system over the last few months.

 

Set-up of the Live Demo

Our partners, Paysys Global and ModusBox, developed and managed the demo payment system in WOCCU’s lab created specifically for this project starting in August. The set-up included the following activities with the selected credit union participants in both countries:

  • Participants were guided through the process of on-boarding, connecting and integrating to the demo payment system through standardized APIs, with onsite and remote support.

  • Detailed user journeys were developed for demo uses cases – customer registration, person-to-person transfers and QR code-based merchant payments

  • A central directory was created to store unique customer or ‘aliases’ linked to customer accounts.

  • A mobile app, called CoopPay, was designed for participants that did not have a delivery channel to register customer and demo the transactions. Credit Unions with their own digital channels / applications were able use their exiting mobile apps or web portal to test these use cases.

  • A dashboard was created to show the live clearing of these transactions as well as the net-off settlement positions at the end of the transaction cycle.

Participants in the Live Demo Workshop

In Manila, we were joined by the Association of Asian Confederation of Credit Unions (ACCU), the National Confederation of Cooperatives (NATCCO), the Philippines Federation of Credit Cooperatives (PFCCO) and the Mindanao Alliance of Self-Help Societies, Southern Philippines Educational Cooperative Center (MASS-SPECC), along with credit union representatives. While attendance in Jakarta included ACCU, Credit Union Central of Indonesia (CUCO), Pt Sakti Kinerja Kolaborasindo (SKK) as well as several credit union representatives from across Indonesia.

The events, held on December 10 in Manila and December 12 in Jakarta, represent the culmination of more than one year of industry facilitation and convenings, research and analysis to explore:

  • the state of digitization in the credit union sector and opportunities to collaborate;

  • analysis of costs that credit unions pay to serve their members, and how digital can improve;

  • the costs members pay to use credit union services, and how digital can improve access; as well as

  • the state of the current digital payments ecosystem in each country.

 

Live Demonstration

1. Customer On-boarding

The customer on-boarding process was the first key use case demonstrated during December’s event. While each individual participating entity will have the option of developing their unique applications, for the purposes of the demo, the project team developed a demo mobile application that would replicate the user experience and interface of these use cases. The creation of alias as a unique customer identifier (mobile phone number, email address or personalized phrase) to be shared with their network for P2P transfers was also demonstrated.

 

2. Person-to-person (P2P) transfers

During the event, the team gave a demonstration of a user from one credit union paying a user from another credit union. In the use case pictured below, an individual from one credit union is paying a friend from another credit union, so that they can purchase groceries for dinner. Through this envisioned shared payment system, users will only require a phone (or any digital device) and a credit union account at a participating institution – enabling payments and transfers from remote locations, in real time.


Use case 1: To facilitate the demonstration, a simplified application called Coop-Pay was created. Here an example new user is asked to register with the application using personal information to create a unique alias that will be used to complete digital payments


3. QR-code-based merchant payments

The team also developed a separate interface for merchant users. While much of the registration process is similar to onboarding for an individual user, merchant users were able to generate QR-code options, static and dynamic, to enable digital payment acceptance at their businesses.

Use Case 2: A Coop Pay user from Ligas Credit Union is requesting money from a member of Toril Credit Union using the Coop Pay application

Use Case 3: In this example, a merchant user of the Sicundo application has generated a dynamic QR code that an individual using the Coop Pay demo app can scan and then pay directly from their application

Continued Engagement

The case for a shared real-time interoperable payment system is well-founded and WOCCU looks to continue our engagement during the proposed implementation phase of this project. As we look to the next phase of this project, we encourage you to reach out to our project team and let us know your thoughts. To spur the conversation, we have included some framing questions below. We would love to hear your feedback and thoughts on the questions below and beyond!

  • What has been your experience using digital payments?
    • What are some challenges you have experienced?
    • What are some opportunities for digital payments in your country?
  • What are you excited about?
  • Based on your experience, what will credit unions need to do to ensure readiness to connect to a real-time payment system?
 
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