Approach

SIGMMA is revolutionary insofar it lays a solid foundation, both technologically and business-wise, to allow existing businesses, mobile money platforms, communities of developers, researchers and users to join an interoperable and open mobile money ecosystem, and tie new strategic partnerships. In keeping with this visionary action in favour of innovation in financial inclusion, the core functionalities of the SIGMMA platform for mobile money is illustrated in the following figure where a blockchain network is at the core of the system for validating the transactions and safe-keeping them in a distributed ledger.

The consortium constituted to address SIGMMA challenges is balanced to include the relevant expertise required to build the infrastructure (based on partner use of the technology in a similar business scenario), to investigate the African context for adoption (based on past experiences with research collaboration in Africa or business setup in the region), and to ensure take-up (by involving the appropriate university partners).

The SIGMMA methodology can be seen in four pillars:

• A co-design pillar where user requirements in the target region are considered to adjust the projected infrastructure and adapt the technology. In this step, some extended partners can join to offer means for experimenting the suitability of the proposed solution.
• A co-creation pillar where technical and institutional partners build together the platform that will serve as demonstration support.
• A show-and-tell pillar where actual services are brought to production, where take-up concerns are addressed through training, and where thought leadership is developed to ensure sustainability of the solution.
• A return-on-experience pillar, where the operation of the platform is analysed to provide insights for the partners, all stakeholders, the European commission and the FinTech community in general.