Crunchfish announces a new patent pending innovation with application number SE2150109-3 that extends offline frictionless mobile payments to also support payment cards.
This is especially important in CBDC implementations as cards as a bearer instrument is important to ensure financial inclusion.
The innovation Crunchfish brings is that cards can be topped-up and used much easier. By simply tapping a card on a mobile the user may top-up the balance on the card or alternatively pay to an offline wallet on the mobile.
The Digital Cash cards may also be implemented with the dual functionality of both maintaining a balance on the card in addition to supporting EMV card rail payments as shown in state-of-the-art card payment implementations such as NPCI’s RuPay Contactless card scheme in India that integrates the National Common Mobility Card wallet used for public transportation payments.
One year ago Crunchfish announced offline frictionless mobile payments as a patent pending innovation, making mobile payments services far more robust by introducing the concept of Digital Cash using a two-tier settlement architecture, offline vs. online.
The solution leverages the fact that it is not important to the merchants if the transfer to their accounts occurs at the moment-of-payment or a little later, as long as there is trust that the transfer will occur. It is critical however, that the payment experience must be robust, smooth and secure.
This implies that the transaction cannot be dependent on the net and cloud payment services. No matter how much investments are made into IT-infrastructure, the systems will never be operational 24/7. An ingenious solution is simply to implement this two-tier settlement architecture.
Recently, the same approach was proposed by VISA in a research paper describing an Offline Payment System (OPS) protocol applied to CBDC. Crunchfish’s original solution was not however limited to CBDC, but equally applicable to all payment schemes – Card, Real-Time Payments and Closed-Loop Wallets.
“The current payment solutions are online schemes based on cards and mobile payment. Now we provide a Digital Cash solution to both mobile as well as card implementations. This innovation for cards is just as ground-breaking as last year’s innovation for mobiles”,
says Joachim Samuelsson, CEO of Crunchfish.
