What is Mojaloop?

"A brief introduction to the goals of Financial Inclusion, LevelOne principles, Interoperability in the payments space and Mojaloop.."

Mojaloop open source software lowers the cost to build, maintain and modify an inclusive instant payment system (IIPS) that brings affordable, connected digital financial services to anyone with access to a mobile phone.

The basic idea behind Mojaloop is that we need to connect multiple Digital Financial Services Providers (DFSPs) together into a competitive and interoperable network in order to maximize opportunities for poor people to get access to financial services with low or no fees. We don’t want a single monopoly power in control of all payments in a country, or a system that shuts out new players. It also doesn’t help if there are too many isolated subnetworks.

The following diagram shows the Mojaloop interconnects between DFSPs and the Mojaloop Hub (schema implementation example) for a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Transfer.

Mojaloop addresses these issues in several key ways: 

1. 1. A set of central services provides a hub through which money can flow from one DFSP to another. This is similar to how money moves through a central bank or clearing house in developed countries. Besides a central ledger, central services can provide identity lookup, fraud management, and enforce scheme rules. 
2. 2. A standard set of interfaces a DFSP can implement to connect to the system, and example code that shows how to use the system. 3. A DFSP that wants to connect up can adapt our example code or implement the standard interfaces into their own software. The goal is for it to be as straightforward as possible for a DFSP to connect to the interoperable network. 
3. Complete working open source implementations of both sides of the interfaces – an example DFSP that can send and receive payments and the client that an existing DFSP could host to connect to the network. 

The Mojaloop Hub is the primary container and reference we use to describe the Mojaloop ecosystem which is split into the following domains: 

• Mojaloop Open Source Services – Core Mojaloop Open Source Software (OSS) by the Open Source Community. 
• Mojaloop Hub – Overall Mojaloop reference (and customizable) implementation for Hub Operators is based on the above OSS solution.