The current domestic and cross-border payments ecosystem faces challenges in establishing secure, efficient, and trustworthy data sharing, and KYC mechanisms among financial institutions. An efficient and robust digital identity protocol can enhance financial inclusion, reduce compliance costs, and mitigate financial crime. However, existing solutions often compromise user privacy or create inefficiencies, increasing costs and complicating regulatory oversight. These solutions may also rely on national identity issuers, which differ in reliability and standards, thereby imposing interoperability challenges. 
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Given these challenges, we call for innovative digital identity solutions. These solutions should enable verifiable, privacy-preserving data exchanges, support regulatory compliance, and facilitate secure identification of trusted participants in a payment. By doing so, they improve efficiency, strengthen risk management, and enhance trust across the ecosystem. 
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For reference, solutions may include decentralized identity frameworks that leverage technologies such as W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Regarding privacy, solutions may consider encrypted data processes and privacy enhancing technologies (PET). Proposed solutions are encouraged to, but not required to, support interoperability through the seamless integration existing domestic and regional identity schemes to enable secure and efficient cross-border payments by establishing trust in data sharing across jurisdictions. 
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On top of demonstrating maturity and effectiveness, the solutions must sufficiently decouple settlement infrastructure from messaging and data exchange layers to ensure flexibility, scalability, and resilience. They should empower participants to adopt the protocol unilaterally without compromising security or operational integrity, fostering trust in a decentralized and interoperable manner. 

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are vital to the global economy, yet many face significant barriers to accessing finance. Forty percent of sub-Saharan Africa SMEs identify lack of financing as their biggest challenge to growth and innovation, both domestically and internationally. Estimates put the region’s funding gap at exceeding USD 140 billion. Traditional financial products, such as letters of credit and supply chain financing, are often inaccessible to SMEs due to outdated processes, excessive paperwork, and limited digital data portability.
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Open finance can address these issues through secure cross-border credit data portability solutions. Over 70 jurisdictions regulate open finance and data with varied standards and frameworks, but the focus largely remains on domestic ecosystems, leaving cross-border data portability underdeveloped. Bilateral approaches risk creating fragmented frameworks, limiting scalability and efficiency. Interoperability must take center stage to overcome these challenges.
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For reference, this problem statement is looking for solutions that enable consumer-consented and secure credit data sharing through secure methods such as encrypted APIs, enabling financial institutions and third-party providers to establish mutual trust and facilitate credit data exchange across borders in a safe, seamless, and trusted environment. Solutions may consider the use of encrypted data processes and other privacy enhancing technologies to protect customer privacy while still enabling the collection, processing, analysis, and sharing of their data protocols should ensure that information is used only for the purposes and duration defined and agreed by the user.
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To clarify, this problem statement calls for solutions that address technological challenges such as navigating diverse digital environments across jurisdictions. However, policy concerns – such as the varying regulatory landscapes and differing data protection regimes – are outside the scope of this problem statement.
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Innovative technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) may be explored to enable real-time credit scoring and workflow automation. Sharing knowledge through technologies such as federated learning can also be used to develop collaborative AI models across different regions without sharing raw data.

The adoption of fast payment systems has transformed the financial ecosystem by enabling immediate, efficient, and accessible transactions, especially in emerging markets where they drive financial inclusion and economic growth. However, this growth has exposed vulnerabilities, including increasing fraud and cyber risks such as account takeovers, phishing, identity theft, social engineering, data breaches, ransomware, and advanced persistent threats.
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These risks are heightened in emerging markets where digital literacy is still developing, which could erode the trust essential for widespread adoption. Balancing speed and efficiency with effective risk mitigation is essential, while trust and integrity are non-negotiable for the success of fast payment systems.
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Accordingly, we are calling for technology solutions that enhance the trust and integrity of fast payment systems by effectively mitigating fraud and cyber risks. The solutions may prefer to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions in real time with high accuracy, while maintaining low latency in fast payment systems and can be applied in both a national and/ or cross-border context. The solutions may also be designed with cost-effectiveness and reducing false positive rates in mind.
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For reference, the proposed solutions may use novel technologies such as but not limited to explainable AI (XAI), graph network methods and other AI methods, amongst other emerging technologies.