Welcome, Joachim.
Thank you.
Yeah. Nice to have you here.
Thank you. Nice to be here.
I have a bunch of questions, and I'm sure you have too, so please use the Q&A function in the meeting during the interview. Let's kick off. The report. Net sales were SEK 285,000, approximately. What's behind these numbers?
It's not much. Compared to last year, I think we had, we did some one-off sale then last year, but it's a huge drop. Obviously, I think this is not the, still not, this quarter wasn't the quarter where we sort of turned things around. The SEK 285,000, I think we were rewarded by RBI that we were part of this third hackathon. This year, they had a way that all finalists were awarded, I think it was INR 10 lakh. A lakh is 100,000, so that means 10 x 100,000, 1 million rupees. INR 1,000,000 was awarded to us from RBI that we were the finalists in this hackathon that I was in Bangalore and presented our solution in early January. That was sort of, I guess, INR 100,000 of it. The rest is mainly, it's actually revenue recognition from contracts on the Gesture side.
Slightly less than INR 200,000 is sort of on the Gesture side that we have, we had these sort of orders and they have a, you know, they work for, I think it is a contract where we revenue recognize monthly during its duration. The other INR 200,000 is for that. That is what we have.
Okay. If you look at costs, the company reported lower costs than our estimates, mainly personnel costs and external costs. Will this continue or are you at the level you're comfortable with?
It will go down a little bit more, unless we do accelerate. We have announced that we have closed down our Gesture business, and we announced that last year that that will give a significant lowering of costs, which is good for us. It gives us a longer runway. That is part of the story. In Q2, we still have, I think one guy is leaving us in June, so his salary is still up to June. There is one more person that is coming back from some illness, and we have not, we did not sort of let him go in his difficult situation. That has a spillover effect. We also have the office, we have not completely gone out of the contract, but we will after 1st July.
From Q3 onwards, I would say, then we are, then we have taken out all the costs for the Gesture side. Then on the other external costs, which also have gone down quite a lot, this is a little bit related then to the Gesture side, but mostly because of our engagement with Ernst & Young, as well as our lawyers from Setterwalls that helped us last year with the round we did at the end of 2023. There were some, you know, legal fees we had for them, but mainly it's sort of related to retainer fee to Ernst & Young, which we do not have anymore, but we did have in Q1 in 2024.
Oh, I see. So you mentioned the runway. You ended the quarter with SEK 40 million in cash holdings.
Yes.
How long is your financial runway?
We're going to get some more money now in the, as this, we had a unit emission, as you remember, in December, which had two, attached to that was two warrants.
Warrants?
One, which was then converted into about, we got some SEK 5 million in February. And it's going to be a little bit more this time. The strike price now is SEK 0.63, and that one is, I think the subscription or where you have to use that is actually here in May. That's going to give us another SEK 6 million, I think, something like that, which means sort of that right now you can see that we were at, if you add that, we are at then SEK 20 million minus a little bit what has happened in April and May. Maybe we are at, I don't know, SEK 16 million, something like that. How is that financial runway? Worst- case scenario, we believe we have, we will sustain ourselves for the rest of the year.
We do count on a little bit of revenue, but that is the worst- case scenario, which is why we had a clean annual report, nothing from the auditor, because you have to then say, can you sustain yourself for another year? That is in the auditor's report. The best way to finance ourselves is through revenues, and that is what we need to do. Hopefully we could turn that around so we are not out of cash early next year, but we actually can, no one will be happier than me if we do not have to do another financing round.
That's in our projections as well.
You have a financing.
Financing round in Q1 2026.
Yeah, you have that. I think.
If nothing else happens.
No, exactly, exactly. I do not blame you that you have that, but my job or my focus is to make you wrong on that as well.
That's the financials. A big theme in the report was the Offline Terminal Infrastructure concept. Could you tell us a bit about this?
Yeah, this is, it's actually something we've had. We've always had it. We've always had an asymmetry in our solution in the sense that the payer has a wallet, an offline wallet, needs high security because otherwise people will sit at home and create their own money, digital money, and we can't have that. No one wants to have that. That needs a secure element, an isolation of that wallet on the device. We have that. We've always had the asymmetry that the receiving side, you could pay from a wallet to, we called it before a verifier, which was a bit technical, but now I think we've just seen the similarities of the card rail, that there are sort of card terminals. What can they do?
When you pay there, they send you a request for a payment, and then there is an interaction with your card or your mobile phone where you have emulated a card, and you send basically a signed message back. The card terminal verifies that message, and if it is offline, it can store it, and then it can send it up to the backend for settlement. That is exactly what our offline terminal does. This concept, instead of calling it a verifier, which is one step that, yes, it can verify a payment, it can do that, certainly, but it can do a little bit more. It can sort of do exactly what a card terminal does. Think of a card terminal, but we have generalized it that this applies to any payment rail.
It is a concept where we look at offline as, all right, there is the wallet side, the paying side, which actually could receive payments as well if you are, you know, you can both receive and pay. We have this asymmetry that there is a receiving side without the ability to pay, just like a card terminal. You do not pay with a card terminal. It only collects payments. Similarly, we can have here this launch of an offline terminal, which, and this is the key thing, this is something that should be part of the payment ecosystem, the payment network. Because if you make that part of the payment network, then all of a sudden you enable everybody to be able to pay. Again, let's do the analogy with the card payments. You have your card. What's your bank? Handelsbanken?
Let's say Handelsbanken.
Let's say Handelsbanken, but you have another bank.
Yes.
Let's say Handelsbanken, even though Martin has another bank. They issue you a card, all right. Handelsbanken, that you don't have, they have nothing to do with the card terminal, but you still are able to pay at the card terminal. The card terminal is put up by, in a way, what's called the payment rail, the card payment rail. It has specification for something called EMVCo. It stands for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa Company. They have the only specifications. In this card terminal, Mastercard have a kernel inside there that can accept Mastercard payments. There is also another kernel from Visa that can accept Visa payments. There are some other card schemes as well. Handelsbanken have not done anything on that part.
There is a clear separation on the card rail between the issuing side, sort of the payer side. This is Handelsbanken gives you the ability to pay and the ability to receive. Very clearly, exactly the same concept is what we see that we have the ability to do as well. The importance of that is that the ability to receive payments should belong to the network, the payment network. The ability to make payments should belong to what is called a payment service provider. It is a service provider that provides end users like you, Martin, with payment ability. Exactly that structure is what we want to replicate. That creates for us a new go-to-market strategy, which is very important. I talk in this, it is sort of like a turnaround for us because I am talking about third times the charm in Swedish, [Foreign language] .
Because in 2023, we went to market where we did a pilot. We had the biggest bank in India, the biggest commercial bank, HDFC Bank. We had IDFC FIRST Bank, one of the most prominent sort of digital first banks in the regulatory sandbox of RBI, Reserve Bank of India. We had not engaged the payment network, which comes from NPCI. We had a solution which did not really scale. What happened really was that HDFC, who is one of the main players in NPCI, because it is a banking corporation, being a big bank, you have a big say. They went to NPCI, you need to put this great innovation that we have seen here on the ecosystem. That became UPI Lite X in 2023, launched by NPCI.
You started working on that side then?
In 2024, that was a second attempt. We said, okay, we need to go to the payment networks. We went to NPCI saying that, oh, look, look at our wallet. It's superior to UPI Lite X, miles apart. We went to a lot of CBDC projects, which is also networks. You know, they set a payment rail for CBDC. We had an announcement from early 2024. We had an announcement from ECB. We're going to spend EUR 220 million buying actually wallets for Europeans. We're going to go for offline. They are a network with their digital euro. They will have their own app, but they will also allow banks and other payment service providers to provide for paying with digital euros. Likewise, RBI came in February 2024 and said, for the digital rupee, offline payments is a priority. That's a network.
It's not the UPI payment rail. That's like Switch in India. They have also now, just like we could have had e-krona, they have e-rupees. That's what RBI is announcing. That's a network. We spent 2024 working really hard with the payment networks. We made, I think, significant progress. We haven't turned it into revenue. Why? Two reasons. ECB, I think, still hasn't decided on where they're going with their, they're in a process. It hasn't been announced yet where they're going with their offline approach. In India, we are very close to RBI, and not close to RBI, but I think they like what we do. They've told us, you have to talk to NPCI because NPCI is not only providing the payment network for UPI, but they're also building the payment network for the digital rupee.
You have to talk to NPCI. We are sort of, we're sort of doing that. If you have a payment network, and I've said that in previous interviews here, you need full control. Think of it, you're going to have hundreds, if not thousands, of payment service providers that rely on your network. You can't have a dependency of a little Swedish company, with a crazy CEO that might all of a sudden change the rules for them. They will never allow that. ECB also, they have very strict rules. They have even said that everybody has to be European to actually even come with technology for the digital euro. They haven't said that in India, thank God. In Europe, they've said that. They don't want to put themselves in a hostile situation.
The other thing is that the market mainly then would consist of the solutions from the payment service provider. This is where it scales. It's multiple banks, it's multiple payment service providers. ECB spends, as we said, EUR 220 million, it could go up to EUR 660 million for, because they plan to buy offline wallets for the entire market. Indians, they're not, they don't think that way at all. They still been, they like our solution and we've been talking and we've been offering, but they're not willing to pay anywhere near what ECB wants to pay. What to do? I am not willing to give NPCI the entire Indian market with our offline wallets. I can't sell anymore to all the banks. I'm not willing to do that because that would be shooting myself in the foot. No scalability.
What we have done now, and this is the third times the charm, let the network have the terminal infrastructure, the Offline Terminal Infrastructure. That is not a high price for that. Because the good thing is that if that is put in place, then that enables the whole market where offline wallets like Crunchfish, and it could be others as well, could actually sell offline wallets into, and that's the big market.
So in this go-to-market strategy, are you addressing RBI or NPCI or?
Yeah, yeah, I speak sort of, yeah, absolutely. We are talking to ECB and we are talking to, yeah, now I think we, it has, we spent 2024 talking to the payment networks and we have not stopped talking to them because we understand if we only talk to the payment service providers as we did in 2023, we will hit the brick wall. We cannot just talk to the payment network providers either. The new strategy in 2025 is that let the networks have, they have the specs and they can offer the receiving side, the terminal side, and leave it to the banks and payment application providers to provide the wallets. That separation where we actually focus on both sides simultaneously, that is the trick.
What has the response been so far? Can you tell us anything about that?
Yeah, it's been good.
Good?
Yeah.
Okay. Sounds promising.
Yes.
Could you tell us anything about if you're reaching an agreement with NPCI, how would such a deal be structured?
It's still being defined in our discussions. I think the idea that we come with here resonates with them because I think they realize that we can't give them the full control over our offline wallet because we have a third-party component from Singapore, the V-Key component. That's in our offline wallet. It's not in the terminal side, but it's in the offline wallet. They understand that V-Key cannot give source code for that with full control to the payment network in India because they would jeopardize all their other hundreds of customers. That means that they can't then take that solution and roll it out widely in the market. That won't do. They can take the terminal side because that doesn't have any V-Key component in it if it only has the ability to receive. They like it.
I think what's nice here is that we can talk to them in terms of how it actually models on a successful payment ecosystem model being what the card networks do. They understand that inside out. They have their own card scheme called RuPay. They have UPI and they support also digital rupee. They have UPI, digital rupee, and they have RuPay, which is the Indian card scheme. They know all about it. This is all from NPCI. If I say we are in a way modeling it after the card scheme, I don't have to say much more. He understands or they understand. We're trying to find sort of how it can be done. The good part is that this will become our go-to-market strategy everywhere.
There's no point of going back and trying to sell the whole solution with wallets and in a way the terminal side anywhere. This is the new way to go-to-market and this helps everywhere.
The OTI structure is conditional on the other applications?
No, but I think if we split it this way, we realize that the terminal side is an excellent entry point to sell into the networks. We can establish that. If you have that, then everybody can receive a payment. You establish what is called the acquiring side, the receiving side. That is done. We can drop ship in and sell to all the banks. We can sell the first structure to the payment networks, but then we can also sell the offline wallets.
First OTI to central bank.
That would be good to set that and then to set that standard. Because one other problem we had in 2023 when we just had two banks that did not have a network with us is that unless you were an IDFC FIRST customer or an HDFC customer, you could not receive a payment. What is the chance if you have 200 banks in India, what is the chance that you find a person that you are on the right bank so I can make a payment? We had an idea of how this could scale incrementally. The structure was there that we can onboard more and more banks. The benefit of getting the network on board from the start is that we can enable the entire country.
Everybody can receive because if they put our terminal infrastructure or terminal, sort of, what do you say, terminal software inside what's called their common library, then anyone can take it, a payment, which is a completely different story than you have to go and look for someone that can receive a payment.
You've launched the strategy. You've started discussions with the ECB and the RBI and NPCI?
ECB does not know about this yet, but we go India first, as you know. So the Indians know about it.
Could you tell us anything about timelines?
What?
Timelines for the discussions and when.
Yeah, they're happening now.
Could you also repeat what, in relation to your other offerings, how do they fit into the?
As I said, this would be a new go-to-market strategy where we realize that we can set the acquiring side, the receiving side, set that with the network and then drop ship in that the network sets the standard. Any bank or payment application provider, they could just take the wallet and it works. It works on the rail because we have already made sure that. Incrementally, you know, one bank can come on board and there will be a first move in the market and say, hey, our customers can now pay offline. That would start in a way like an, I think, I want to have that as well. All right, we can help you.
You have an agreement with the IDFC FIRST Bank.
Yeah, we have that.
Is that included in this?
No, yeah, they would be already, they already have support for all this because they've already bought our wallet. So they have it already. This could scale for them as well. Not only for the digital rupee that we currently have with them out live in the market, but they can put it now. If we get NPCI on board on the receiving side with the terminals, then IDFC could put it for all their UPI or all their customers having UPI payments as well. Absolutely.
Because in India, the RBI prompted the transition into value-based tokens during the spring. How is that project going?
I think they put enormous pressure because there were, as we discussed, I think last time, they were on a structure where they had fixed denominations. They have really literally done digital rupees as they have a bank note of INR 100 and they had a digital equivalent and it was exactly INR 100. It is hard if I meet you, Martin, and you say, I owe you INR 15, I have INR 100 and you maybe have a INR 10. We cannot get to INR 15 by even doing an exchange. This was not a good idea. They have gone for a structure now which they call value-based tokens and they pushed all the banks. I think the deadline was actually end of Q1 to make the transition, but it is a huge transition. I know that there are delays, but I think they are still working hard, all the banks.
They have about 15 piloting banks and they have some payment application providers as well. They are all working hard to transition into this new structure. The digital rupee, it's great that it's very pronounced from the Reserve Bank of India that offline should be part of it. Just like the ECB says that offline should be part of the digital euro. Volume-wise, and NPCI with UPI, they do 17 billion transactions per month. That is more than Mastercard does globally. I actually was at an event with a German up in Stockholm yesterday, and I asked this guy who was one of their managers, how many transactions do you think UPI makes a month? He said, 300 million. I said, you are off with the factor probably 50. They do 17 billion. That is sort of like, if you think of it, do you know how many is that per second, Martin? If you have a steady flow.
Yeah, that's a lot.
How many do you think?
Wow.
Now, you know, I think it is somewhere around every second, but you know, then there would be peak hours when they do more. They do something like between 5,000 and 10,000 transactions per second. That is the pulse that they have.
We received some questions from the audience and one of them is wondering, do you need to make a new offering to NPCI now with this new solution?
As I said, I don't know how many offerings we made to NPCI during 2024, but because they were asking us, oh, can you tweak it this way, tweak it that way, tweak it that way? I think Patrik calculated too that we have sent 15 proposals. This goes on, but I think with a change now, because this proposal that we're doing now, and we've done it in a very methodical way, this now is set up in a way which works for them, where they have full control over the source code. They will just have to do the same thing that RBI has already decided on, that they're going to open up, that it's not just the NPCI own offline wallet which is allowed.
They will open up that third parties like Crunchfish could actually also be allowed to have an offline wallet in the market that is compatible with the NPCI payment network. They are warming up to that idea. They will do it sort of for the digital rupee. That is sort of RBI, it is their product, they are pushing for that. I believe that NPCI may do it as well for UPI because they want to keep architecturally quite similar.
Another viewer is wondering if the network providers need to change or implement the new systems or is it something that they have and just can add?
We have this whole thing. We've had it since 2021. We have the protocols, how you communicate offline. We have the protocols or the APIs, how you communicate online. We have the source code, which we happily want to provide them. We have this whole spec and it works in our grand scheme of things for about everything. This is the generalizations we've done. We're happy to give them what we had before. We call it the verifier part, but now we're calling it the offline terminal part. Yeah, we have it.
This is not a big step for their network?
It's not a big step for them. It's not a huge amount of code because it's just supposed to, it doesn't have high security. It needs to send a payment request. It needs to verify what comes back. It's a signed payment. Hold that if you're offline. When you go online, you're just going to send it up to the backend. It's not rocket science. We have the protocols and we have the APIs and we have the source code. It's not much code that they have to put in as well. It's not a big, big project.
I have a question regarding the CBDC implementation in India. How does the, you mentioned it briefly before, but could you just repeat how does the OTI offering relate to the CBDC project?
Yeah, it would be the same. I think NPCI, who provides the payment network for the digital rupee as well, they should just, in what they're calling it, they don't call it the common library, they call it the CBDC SDK. So they have an SDK for CBDC, which all the banks need to have that. All the third-party payment application providers need to have that. So that there is some sort of software for NPCI that goes everywhere. Inside there, they should do the terminal infrastructure or the terminal software supporting offline payments, supporting the ability to receive an offline payment and send it back to the backend. That is what should be done. If they do that, then one by one, we don't have to take them all. Just one by one could decide, okay, now HDFC Bank decides our customers should pay offline.
They could just source in an offline wallet, which could come from NPCI also, but so far they have not succeeded in doing a successful offline wallet, but it could come from a player like us. It could come from others as well. I think we would have a head start if we set the standard for how the, in a way, if you think of it, if one company in the world could come to India and say, we can set a new standard for a generalized card terminal that works on any rail and that is Crunchfish, that is a pretty cool thing. We are the ones that then can sell our offline wallets to not just one bank, but to the whole market. We cannot lock them in that they only can take our offline wallet.
We will be, we need to democratize it that the payment service providers, they can choose whatever offline wallet they want. This happens to be really a good one that comes from a smaller company in Sweden.
Yeah. If you describe the infrastructure in, for instance, in the payment rail in India, is the card payment rail parallel to the offline or is it?
They don't do.
Potentially generalize the card rail?
Yeah, we actually had it. We had even a, we actually decided to abandon that patent application because our idea could have also gone for the card rail. We got some resistance on that innovation, so we decided to take that down. We have a lot of generalization of the card rail as well. The fact that our offline terminal is for, you know, it can be used for crypto, it can be used for real-time payments like UPI, it can be used for CBDC, it could be used for mobile operators. I think we are just completely general. It does not just have to be the card rail. We even generalize the card rail because with our system, we can interchangeably be paying between Mastercard and Visa.
You can be a Mastercard payer and it could be, you know, it could be with offline going to our offline terminal and that could be then processed. A Visa can also pay. We are generalizing even that.
Okay. So you're circumventing the?
India is not like Sweden. It's easy here in Sweden to think everything is like Sweden and it's not. India has only a few merchants. It's sort of in the big cities that have card terminals. Everything else is done via just mobile payments and it's almost like a peer-to-peer payment that I would pay you, Martin. What we want to say is that we want to have peer-to-terminal payments because then merchants all over India can receive payments.
The question is regarding patents. Is the OTI protected in India?
Yeah.
Yeah. So the patents you're finding?
It's patent pending. Not OTI itself, but the way we have our approach, which people who have been following us, I've always talked about that what we do is reserve, so you reserve some money that you can spend offline. You pay offline and then we settle. What is settlement? Settlement is when the money is moved from an account to another one in the backend. We do Reserve, Pay, and Settle. How we have that approach to offline payments is that something happens offline with a spending limit that you created for yourself and then we settle it later online. It's this two-step process. That is what we have patented. There are other ways, but it would be less secure.
That is to do what a lot of people think is the way to go for offline payments, is that you fund your wallet and then you pay. Then whoever at the end has something that has, I pay you and you can pay to Oscar here. Oscar will just defund. If you do it that way, there is a huge risk that if you are a fraudster, Martin, not saying you are, but if you are, how can they in the backend detect that the money that Oscar has, which looks like a legitimate claim, because Oscar wants his money from, it's a claim on the central bank, how can they detect that there was in that chain of events happening offline, there was a fraudster for Martin? It is very hard to do.
What they need to do is to put in an extra reconciliation layer. It is a bit extra. What in our elegant solution, we do not just transfer something to you, Martin, and you transfer to Oscar as a token which Oscar can just claim. We view it as a digital check instead of seeing it as a digital bank note. I have an IOU. That is what I sign out. I owe you, Martin. This is what you receive. That could credit your balance offline. You write out an IOU to Oscar. Every step of the way needs to be settled. That means that we can reuse the existing online payment rail because this is how it works online, that I create an IOU if I have an online payment to you, Martin, and they move the money. I am just reducing that.
I don't have to build any overly complicated reconciliation structure online to keep track of if there are fraudsters. This will be detected using the standard online settlement system. That's why I think, I think our approach that Crunchfish has patented is the winning approach for the offline world.
Should we return to IDFC FIRST Bank just for a moment and the agreement you signed a couple of years ago?
2023. Yeah, they were the ones who signed up.
Exactly. This agreement could potentially imply short-term revenue for Crunchfish should they enroll clients in their applications.
Yeah, we have a, there's seven steps in some sort of ladder there.
This agreement is still valid and it's.
It actually should be renewed now, but we are talking about, I think now it's getting very interesting for us and for them because they're not doing, I think this implementation they've done is the telecom solution because they can do it on their own. It doesn't need a network because they connect directly to the payment network via an SMS. Now the real thing with proximity payments, full offline, they can do that as well. If we get the network on board, then as I said, they can go for it for all their customers and they will be an early adopter. We are talking about them to them, maybe at GFF, this is the Global FinTech Fest in Mumbai. We participated for two years. We stand next to NPCI and RBI. This is a good place to actually showcase great innovation.
They just said, we just have to fix this value-based token implementation, but then they are willing to talk to us. We like, they're like a, it's a bridgehead for us where we have access to paying and a real customer.
They are not really enrolling clients at the moment?
No, right now they are trying to just get the online value-based tokens to work really. Yeah, but this could work. I think this is just one bank out of probably a thousand different. This is a good one. I agree they are early. I think the game has changed now because if I get the network, then I get that established and then that is open for everybody.
It could still serve as a proof of concept for your.
No, it's not just a proof of concept. It's sort of, they're live in production. The product they have from us, it can pay connecting to the backend, but they can also definitely do also, if they just would find any receivers, they can certainly also pay fully offline in proximity.
Yeah. Let's switch to Europe for a moment and talk about the ECB project.
Yes.
You announced that you were selected as one of maybe seven.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Seven. Yeah, that one. Yeah.
Could you tell us more about this?
Yeah.
What happens if you're allowed?
Yeah. Yeah. No, here I'm allowed actually. There are sort of two, I think it's just for clarity. Last year, they did a huge tender. This is the one with EUR 220 million that can go up to EUR 660 million. This is for an offline solution, which they have said should use hardware secure element, which we think is, yeah, will that ever work? Because there is no ecosystem to actually deploy them. We question that. The other thing is that they have this Fund, Pay and Defund, and they need to build a reconciliation layer. They have that, all these, what I think is structurally a flawed approach. That is what they are shooting for.
You told them.
Yeah. I think the problem is as well is that they are biting a huge bullet by buying all the wallets. Instead, there is an alternative approach that I discussed. What they've now also done is that not only have they decided to focus on offline payments, which I really think is great that they did that, they have also announced that conditional payment, they call it. They announced that last year that this is also an area of huge interest to us. We want technical pioneers who can show us use cases for conditional payments. Conditional payments is like an online payment, but the difference is that the settlement step, remember, settlement is when you move money, that already from the start comes with some conditions. It's not like, all right, you have agreed to pay me and then move the money.
There are some conditions applied. It could be a time constraint. It could be that if I'm a, I deliver goods, you don't want to give me the money until I've given the transportation company the goods, then the money will go. They need a signature from the transportation company. That could be one example. It's based on what? It's based on Reserve, Pay, and Settle because when you sign up for such a payment, the conditional payment, which is also known as a smart contract in the crypto world, is also known as programmable payments. You program in rules for the payment. In order for it to settle automatically when everything is, all the conditions are met, your bank will take the money from you when you set up that payment.
Because otherwise, they cannot trust that it will actually be settled when the time is right. They work on this Reserve and then Pay and Settle paradigm, which exactly is the paradigm we have for offline payments. What we have told ECB, this is when we applied, that fantastic that you're going for conditional payments because it just happens that our way of doing offline payments is exactly that because we reserve money and I reserve it not for a merchant. I reserve it for myself, but it's still, there is a reservation and they support it on the digital euro rail. I make a payment offline. What is the condition that the backend is waiting for? They are waiting for that from either the payer or the payee comes back to the backend, a signed offline transaction that they could trust.
When they see that, they move the money. What we are telling them is that it's great that you have now put conditional payments or smart contracts in place, the structure for that, because all of a sudden we can do offline payments for you and you do not have to wait many, many years until the ecosystem with hardware secure elements, if it ever will happen, you can actually do offline payments now. We can also tell them that, why do you not put an Offline Terminal Infrastructure in place? Would not cost them much. Just a tiny fraction of EUR 220 million. Put that in place. Everybody can receive. Let the payment service providers, the banks or yourself and others pay offline tomorrow. We can support that. We have already programmed that and we are going to.
You will do?
We will do it.
[crosstalk] You will test it?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This project ends now in May. It was announced in May, but that's just because they were late in allowing us to announce it. We've been working on this one. We started in February. We were enrolled in February, but we could not say anything until May. Then we could. There are 70 participants, we're one of them. We have already done and as we speak, we're finalizing our report, the final report. They will consider this as, is this an interesting addition to the digital euro payment rail? I think it is. All of a sudden they enable Europe, not in many years with hardware secure elements that probably, I think probably will not happen. That's my prediction. They can have offline payments this year by us.
They will state their conclusions in a report?
I don't know. I don't know how they, but I think they will bring in all the things and then they will look at what it is. I think we have a really, I don't think they thought of it because they thought of smart contracts or conditional payments as an online thing. We just showed them that, look, the structure you put in place and we have put it, we've implemented our way of doing it already in their sandbox. We are moving digital euro with our offline payments. It works.
This showcase is separate from the tender you participated in last year. [crosstalk]
[crosstalk] Yeah, because it's just this was for conditional payments. And we are a technical pioneer for that. It just happens that we are showcasing offline payments in that context. But they are going for this Fund, Pay, Defund, Reconciliate as a completely separate. This is like an adjunct structure. What we have is a seamlessly integrated thing that can use the online settlement rail that is already in place.
Yes. Could you tell us anything about the other tender?
Which one? No, we're not allowed.
No, no?
No, we're not allowed.
Still, still not allowed?
Yeah, we were one of the five selected. I've said that before, but I'm not allowed to say anything more.
No. Okay.
Yeah.
Leave it there. CBDC is not only happening in the EU or India. Could you tell us about your ambitions elsewhere?
Yeah. No, I'm heading for Bangkok because this idea, as I said, with this separation that the CBDC project should, they should definitely put in place the terminal infrastructure because everybody can receive a payment and then we can drop ship in offline wallets after that. That applies everywhere. I'm going to, this is the Digital Currency Conference in Bangkok. I have a speaking slot there where I'm talking about this groundbreaking ecosystem approach. There will be a lot of central bankers there because this is, and we have already some projects where we started with working with already 2024 where this applies also. As I said, this is not just for India. It's for everywhere. It's our new go-to-market strategy, which helps to go to market.
You're talking to partners in Sweden as well?
Yeah. Yeah. We certainly have talked to everybody probably saw that on the news that Sweden should invest more in offline payments because of the secured situation. I think so far they've just said have more cash, which is an offline thing in your mattress. We are going to force some businesses to accept cash like grocery shops and petrol shops. We are going to do that by law. That is what we are thinking. They have announced that they will have a new card scheme, where they can set the rules themselves that a terminal could accept maybe payments for a week. That is it. I am saying, what about Swish? We could enable offline payments with Swish tomorrow. This is, why not think of Swish? They do present Swish as a key rail in Sweden, but they have no plans for how to make that resilient.
I think that's just a mistake. We are talking to Swish as well. I would have hoped that the Riksbank would put some pressure on the banks that you can do Swish, but only if you actually do it resilient. It would just happen. They are just thinking of cash and cards, which I think they can improve.
Yes. We're approaching the end of this webcast. I encourage you all to send in questions if you have them. I noted, or we noted that you've changed your website somewhat.
Yes. It is under the menu Digital Cash, that whole flow that goes under that menu is completely rewritten. I announced that actually, you do not know that Martin because you were here with me, but it came out press release at 9:00 A.M. where we announced that. It is important because I think the previous website or the previous explanation of Digital Cash did not do us justice. It needed an overhaul anyway, but certainly now with this new go-to-market and explaining it more clearly. It is new, completely rewritten in a way. I think we kept the demo flows and we kept the, we have a little bit on our patterns. I think that we kept those frames, but the rest is just new stuff, which relates to what we are talking about today.
That's good. If you didn't catch everything that Joachim said today, you can always visit the website.
If I could make a little bit of a marketing announcement or whatever you can call it, I appreciate that the report, which was released at 8:30 A.M. today, and we're having this interview just a few half an hour later, it's very hard to come with questions for that. That's why, which is not our norm, but on Friday, we will have what's called a lunch talk together with Emergers and Johan Widmark there. The difference will be that it will be in Swedish and it will be in 48 hours from now. We will turn off the chat function because we will have it that please you can ask questions, but we will set it up as a meeting. Please do it verbally. You are more than welcome to join there and you have 48 hours, a little bit more, to come up with all your questions.
That's good. To wrap this up, final questions. There's evidently a lot of things going on in Crunchfish at the moment. The next report will be in August.
Yeah, mid-August or third week of August, I think.
What do you hope to have achieved until then?
I hope to have done to set the deal with a network provider. That could be that there are several choices there, but I certainly hope that. Yeah, I think if we get a network provider with the terminal on the terminal side, because then that opens up the whole market for us in that region or that country, at least one of those. If we can have that, then I think we are, I hope we can avoid a new financing round, which as I said, that's my job to try to do. Yeah, I don't like them either.
Okay. Thank you, Joachim, for coming and talking about this.
Thank you, Martin, for preparing it.
Thank you all viewers and people who have sent in questions. If you missed anything, this video will soon be uploaded to Västra Hamnen's YouTube channel. Subscribe and watch out.
Yeah. I think we will put it, we will put this when you send it to us, we will put it on our web as well. I guess, who will do a press release on it? Will you do it or you just put it up?
We will put it up. We will do also a written comment on the report.
Yeah, yeah. We do a press release on, yeah, that's how I normally do it. We will press release this as soon as we get it from you, we'll press release it and then we put it out on our web as well.
Yeah. Cool. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
See you later.