Crunchfish Digital Cash pilot in India is scaling up
Crunchfish in partnership with HDFC Bank and another Indian bank are piloting offline payments in a project monitored by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in their Regulatory Sandbox program. HDFC Bank, one of the leading banks in the world, have launched a website that describes “OfflinePay – Payments that work, without any network”. The project has been scaled up significantly in terms of numbers of payers and merchants.
Online Real-time Payment Services, such as UPI in India and Swish in Sweden, are by design vulnerable to temporary outages; whether it is payer that cannot get online connectivity, the remitting or beneficiary bank is congested, or any payments switch is down. Offline payment schemes, on the other hand, provide survivability in the face of any temporary failures. Whereas an offline payment scheme may facilitate an instant online transaction, the reverse is not true. Delivering a robust, inclusive and private digital payments service, requiring offline payments as the fundamental building block, must be a firm requirement by the financial regulator in any country in order to provide a stable payments eco-system.
Crunchfish have published several press releases related to this project. Crunchfish were included in the Reserve Bank of India’s Regulatory Sandbox* in September 2022, the integration of Crunchfish Digital Cash offline was ready in October 2022, and when the pilot started in December 2023. HDFC Bank have now published a description of their implementation of Crunchfish Digital Cash offline as “OfflinePay – Payments that work, without any network”.
*The Regulatory Sandbox was established in 2020 by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to foster responsible innovation in financial services, promote efficiency and bring benefit to end users. The Regulatory Sandbox is a formal regulatory program for market participants to test new products and services with customers in a live environment, subject to certain safeguards and oversight. It allows the regulator, innovators, financial service providers and end users to conduct field tests to collect evidence on the benefits of new financial innovations, while carefully monitoring and containing their risks. To be approved access to the Regulatory Sandbox, the proposed financial service shall include new or emerging technology, or use of existing technology in an innovative way and should address a problem and bring benefits to consumers.
For more information, please contact:
Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish AB
+46 708 46 47 88
joachim.samuelsson@crunchfish.com
This information was provided by the contact person above for publication on 08 February 2023 at 14:30 CET.
Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance AB is the Certified Adviser. Email: ca@vhcorp.se. Telephone +46 40 200 250.
About Crunchfish – crunchfish.com
Crunchfish is a deep tech company developing a Digital Cash platform for Banks, Payment Services and CBDC implementations and Gesture Interaction technology for AR/VR and automotive industry. Crunchfish is listed on Nasdaq First North Growth Market since 2016, with headquarters in Malmö, Sweden and with a subsidiary in India.
