June 7, 2018: Clear Purchase Press Release
San Francisco, CA: June 7, 2018: Clear Purchase, founded by payment infrastructure expert Nick Brown, announced they have decided to build their secure payment system for a cashless economy in developing countries without incorporating Mojaloop, developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They cited unaddressed security concerns predominately around the decision to make Mojaloop code ‘open source’. The inevitable wholesale fraud that would result in developing countries would hurt the very people they were trying to help, and might even stall the entire global Financial Inclusion initiative for years.
The payment industry is not the right industry for open source code, as it encourages those with insufficient relevant experience to enter an industry they do not fully understand, believing it is a complete and secure system. With over $20B per year of payment fraud globally, a Mojaloop based system would be too tempting and easy a target. The inevitable fraud would affect the poorest people on this planet, with the Mobile Money Operators being blamed, and their ‘experiment’ would likely be scrapped. It may be years before they trust another systems.
Nick Brown said, “Any expert in this industry would avoid Mojaloop for this reason.” He added, “It is obviously a pity that we could not find a way of working together. There was so much potential combining our depth of experience in the industry with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s dedication to improving poor people’s lives in developing countries.”
The full assessment of Mojaloop written by Nick Brown can be found at: www.clearpurchase.com/docs/CP201806-Mojaloop-Assessment.pdf
Nick Brown is a technical expert with 30 years of experience in the payment infrastructure industry, which included the implementation of the VISA Debit Card system at VISA International. He has also been involved in writing national and international standards for data security for the financial services industry.
Clear Purchase, Inc. is part of the movement to break the poverty trap in developing countries by creating a truly cashless economy, our role being to build the payment network hub that connects everyone together to facilitate even the tiniest transactions.