Not only were people simply obtaining accounts that remained stagnant, but according to the World Bank, millions of adults who opened accounts began using them which is a key metric. The growth in usage was directly correlated to acceleration of the digitization of services during the pandemic. The importance of digital access rights is increasingly gaining momentum amongst cross governmental agencies, and has been officially recognized by the United Nations, with the implementation of the Roadmap on Digital Cooperation commencing in June 2020. Of its tenets, “ensuring digital inclusion for all, including the most vulnerable” as well as “achieving universal connectivity by 2030” are issues they are setting out to resolve.

Although alternate financial services are now available, fuelled by the rise in digital financial infrastructure, multiple barriers for people on the margins of financial systems remain. Traditional payment networks operate independently from each other, and while sending money through a digital transaction can feel like a giant leap from going to a bank branch, it is still only relatively easy if the sender and recipient have accounts on the same network. Payments between different networks are slow and expensive, preserving many of the costs and inefficiencies that have long been a barrier to financial inclusion.  

The Interledger Foundation, an independent, grant-making, non-profit foundation believes the removal of these barriers can be achieved in part, through open-source technologies. Their mission is to make financial systems work for everyone, everywhere, and bring more diverse voices into the tech ecosystem. They are stewards of the Interledger Protocol (ILP) , an open protocol suite enabling payments to be sent on the web as easily as information. It creates a world where borders are not barriers to making or receiving payments, and it doesn’t cost more, to pay less.

From the Interledger perspective, global financial inclusion  is not a utopian concept; It is a complex but achievable goal - one that necessitates the commitment and collaboration between technology leaders, central banks worldwide, governments, policymakers, creators, and civil society.

According to Briana Marbury, CEO and President of the Interledger Foundation, “We have global financial systems that billions of people have been historically excluded from participating in, but through technological innovation there’s an opportunity to make previously inaccessible systems more inclusive and interoperable.”

Briana leads the foundation with a wealth experience in business and finance and a passion for social justice. With a degree from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Wayne State University, she held several key finance roles in the non-profit sector. After attending Stanford University’s Emerging CFO-Strategic Financial Leadership Program, she started her own consultancy before joining Interledger in 2020.

Her motivation for fairer finance systems stems in part from her own experiences growing up in Detroit where she says “Growing up in Detroit, I witnessed people struggle with the simple task of cashing their weekly paycheck because they didn’t have a bank account. Anxious to access their hard earned money, the quickest and easiest way was to turn to a corner store that was happy to cash their check, but charged high fees which they couldn’t afford. Yet they had to pay because they needed to put food on the table.”

In her role at the Interledger Foundation, she is working to inspire a new mindset of collaboration and growth to enact the global systemic change required for financial inclusion. The foundation works with a global community of entrepreneurs, developers, innovators, creators and artists to support research, development and implementation of the ILP. This enables new financial systems to be interoperable, interconnected and intentionally inclusive.

As a grant making foundation they directly fund local projects, because according to Briana, “However, well-meaning organizations and corporations are often prescriptive without fully understanding the challenges and barriers faced by the very individuals they propose solutions for.”  Through supporting at a grass roots level, the foundation aims to rebuild systems with the under represented communities they serve, not for them. A recent example was the Financial Services grant, which funded 12 new projects to expand the ILP network, based on the core belief that the people experiencing problems, need to be the ones imagining solutions.

This belief informed a recent report into ‘Open and instant payments in Africa - current landscapes and opportunities’ produced in collaboration with DFS Lab, an early-stage investor and advisory firm. This set out to gain a better understanding of the intricate and complex digital payments landscape of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The findings of the report underpin a commitment from the Interledger Foundation to adapt their technology and ideas to the realites of the people it may benefit.

For Briana this is what makes her work at Interledger Foundation appealing, she says “Everything we do is with a lens of creating solutions that benefit others. Also, since the technology is open source it is shared with the community enabling everyone to grow together”. The foundation makes all research available to the community and aims to enable through knowledge sharing, advocacy and direct support, an ecosystem that enables sustainable, scalable, systemic change.

Through their holistic, global activities the Interledger Foundation aims to unlock the potential of digital technologies through open-source code to advance the financial inclusion agenda, so everyone can realize the value of financial inclusion.