Adam Torres and Briana Marbury discuss financial inclusion.
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Show Notes:
Interledger Foundation is on a mission to provide financial inclusion to the world’s unbanked individuals. In this episode, Adam Torres and Briana Marbury, President & CEO at Interledger Foundation, explore the Interledger protocol and plans for expansion.
About Interledger Foundation
The Interledger Foundation’s mission is to develop, support, and steward community and technical infrastructure for the Interledger protocol and related technologies. It will promote creativity, innovation, and inclusion by building on the work already done to create Interledger, creating and maintaining more open standards and open source technologies and connecting diverse constituencies to promote these goals.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So did I have Brianna Marbury on the line and she is president and CEO at Interledger Foundation.
Brianna, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here. All right. So we have a lot to talk about today. and I definitely want to get to know more about Interledger Foundation and your work there. But before we do that we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our Mission Matters Minute.
So Brianna, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is really to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts, like people that we know have missions out there that we want to be heard. So that’s what we do in our mission. Brianna, what mission matters to you? The mission that matters to me is making a difference in underrepresented communities.
And that is why I do the work that I do. From the time I graduated college, I, Initially started with a for profit company, but quickly realized that I wanted to work for organizations that were making a difference in their communities and around the world. So that is why my mission matters to me.
Fantastic. Love bringing mission based individuals on the show to share why they do what they do. I guess just to get us kicked off here. I mean, Interledger Foundation, tell us more. So, yes, the Interledger, and before we, we start on the Interledger Foundation, I also wanted to say I am a University of Michigan grad.
So, I won’t hold that against you. My mom went there. It’s okay. I won’t hold that against you. My mom went there. I went to Michigan State. It’s okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, I spent a lot of fun and fun times in the big house. Not a problem. Go ahead. So, the Interledger Foundation is a nonprofit foundation that is Based in the U.
S. And what we do is bring underrepresented communities and individuals into the tech space and try to create solutions for people who are trying to make payments a lot easier. The too long didn’t read version of what the intellectual protocol itself is, is it’s the modern way to send payment. So. The same way that the internet sends data really quickly the intraledger protocol Sends funds.
So we say that we try to send payments make sending payments as easy as an email and so tell us a little bit more about the underserved, area of the market in banking like I don’t want to assume everybody listening kind of understands that not everybody, you know has access to financial instruments So tell us a little bit more about that Yeah, so I think that we take for granted how easy it is to send payments or go to the bank or send someone a payment via cash app.
But one thing I didn’t realize when I started in this field was that there are over 1. 4 billion people in the world currently who are unbanked or underbanked, meaning that They don’t have access to a bank account. And so what we’re trying to do at the intellectual foundation is bring those people into the digital financial world and give them access to digital financial resources.
In case, say, for instance, you might not be able to get a bank account. And so not just looking at financial institutions, but looking at other means for people to be able to transact and participate in their economies. Why is that so important? Because I feel like going back to what you said, sometimes we take that for granted, like things like even, even establishing a banking history, like why is that so important?
It’s so important for so many different reasons. Imagine if you couldn’t pay your light bill via internet, or you couldn’t send money to a friend and it gets there immediately. Sometimes in some areas of the world, it’s. It takes people an entire day to go around and pay their bills. And these are people who that’s lost wages, that’s what they could be doing something else.
They’re spending like a day. Exactly. Spending time with your family. Instead of working. Exactly. So when you talk about, yeah. Or working or spending time. I agree with you. They could have been doing that too. Go ahead. Exactly. Or, say for instance you want to send money to a family member in another part of the world.
If they don’t have a bank account or they don’t have a compatible app, it’s going to be really costly for you to do that. As opposed to, say, sending them an email where they can get it very quickly, it’s going to take a lot longer or costlier. And so we’re trying to bring down those costs. tell me about your your decision to kind of take this and roll this out.
Like , what’s the plan to continue to get this to more and more unbankable people on people that aren’t banked, I should say to bring them into the system. Like what’s the plan to grow this. So our plan is to work with people who are trying to build on the infrastructure, people who are already trying to.
Solve for this issue, but might not have the right technology to do so So say for instance that you hear in this world a lot about interoperability of payment We are the answer for interoperability of payment People think that banks are connected and can send money and that’s not necessarily true right now You have the swift system that you know, it was really good for You The time that it was needed, but it’s slow.
It’s clunky. And so we work with people who are already trying to make this happen, whether that’s with the financial institution, whether that’s with an entrepreneur or say, mobile money providers, because that has is something that has exploded, especially since covet and it gives people an alternative way to be able to send funds.
We work with people to implement the interledger protocol in their current existing financial infrastructure to update it. So, Brianna, you’ve mentioned the interledger protocol maybe twice.
So let’s go a little bit further and educate me and my audience on that. Like tell me a little bit more about the protocol. So the Interledger Protocol, which is what we advocate for here at the Interledger Foundation, is a technology and a set of standards that enables people to have a shared language between financial institutions, and it enables you to Send payments faster and less expensive and it is based off of the same principles of the Internet.
You have Internet, Interledger, and where the Internet carries small packets of data to get to one place to another. The same way with the Interledger protocol, it carries small packets of money to get to one place or another. Want to get into this a little bit further. Why, why are there so many unbankable people?
like, talk a little bit maybe about how this is taking place? Because I think sometimes when people listen to this, this type of interviewer, they think, well, unbankable or this or that, and they think that maybe there was something there that, like, shouldn’t have been. But for some of these markets, they were just never built up.
Right? Like when you think about how how the markets evolved. So maybe talk about why there is some, so many unbankable individuals. So by the financial institutions, they were never deemed worth investing in. So a lot of these populations. very small amounts of payment. And for banks, it wasn’t worth it to set up the infrastructure in these communities because it would be costly.
What ended up happening for the bank, they have to make money somehow. So like a car loan or this or that, you have credit you have lines of credit. It, A lot of different areas where they make money. And so these small, these small payments that people were exchanging were not deemed credible. And also a lot of the requirements that these traditional financial institutions have in place to be able to obtain a bank account, such as an ID or an address in some communities, they don’t even have that.
So what ended up happening is these mobile money providers came about especially in and really spread like wildfire during COVID and that enabled people to be able to make payments with their phones What ended up happening is that these small payments aggregated to trillions of dollars.
Wow. Now, this is what they have deemed an emerging market, because they’re trying to figure out, okay, how can we capture Some of this market share that we just completely ignored for years and unlike the old Swiss system or some of the more antiquated ones that were maybe expensive, or they took more to run like this new type of protocol makes it more accessible.
Am I off on that? In my understanding, or it makes it more, potential there for to make it a a system that works. Am I off on that? Or Sorry. Yeah, so it’s a system that works internationally. With SWIFT, you have to have an agreement with the, the financial institution that you are exchanging with, and they have something that’s called settlement that happens at a prescribed time, and the payment and the settlement are linked together.
What the interledger protocol does is it separates the payment from the settlement, and it enables you to Send payments at a faster time scale, and then you decide the settlement with the other companies. So that enables you to be able to send money to people and with different currency. And right now, say, for instance, if you wanted to send money to someone in Nigeria.
The channels that it would have to go through, it has to come pass through the United States 1st and then go to the other financial institution. But with the interledger protocol, which is a network of networks, it will make that transaction time a lot faster. . Well, I have to say, Brianna, this is a it’s a great story, one that I’m happy to bring to my to my audience, and I’m also happy to learn about as well.
So understanding, you know, a new way to help the world’s unbankable people and to, you know, facilitate commerce really, because ult, at the end of the day, like you just mentioned, getting their time back. Whether it’s not spending a day trying to make payments or whether it’s, you know just building that, that history, I think that this is all great.
That being said, we’re about out of time for today’s episode, but Brianna, if somebody wants to learn more about the foundation or to connect what’s the best way for them to do that? They can reach out to us at interledger. org or info at interledger. org. We always have grant opportunities open for people and entrepreneurs who want to start to help and build with us in addressing this issue.
Fantastic. And we’ll put all that information into the show notes so that so that our audience can just click on the links and head right on over and speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters or listening to an episode, we’re all about bringing on business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives, and having them share their mission.
The reason behind their mission, you know, why they do what they do, what, what makes them tick. And if that’s the type of content that sounds interesting or exciting to you, we welcome you hit that subscribe button. We have many more mission based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing.
Brianna, thank you again so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much, Adam.