Welcome everyone to Westerhamen Corporate Finance and Market Focus. Today, we'll dive into the latest updates from Crunchfish. The company has just released its Q2 report for 2025. I'm standing here with the CEO, Joachim Samuelsson. Very much welcome, Joachim.
Yeah, here we go again.
Yep, nice to have you here. We will discuss the latest events. I encourage all the viewers to participate. Please type in questions, and we will address them as we go along. Let's not start with the biggest ones, and instead focus on the reception of your revised go-to-market strategy.
Yeah.
The title of the report is, "That is working. The new approach is working." Could you just briefly tell us how has the reception from the industry been?
Yes, it's working. The reception has been overwhelming. We are extremely happy with that. I think we've had a couple of conversations there. The more we've got positive reviews from the market, the more, in a way, bold I've been able to be. Basically saying that how we were selling before, nobody wanted our system. What I mean with that is that if you're a payment network, you couldn't take our whole system because you are supposed to receive payments, accept payments, and process them. You don't want to pay for wallets. That's the paying part. On the other hand, if you are a payment service provider, if we don't have the network with us, they can only take in wallets, but they don't have the acceptance side. By splitting the product, that was the whole idea of what we talked about three months ago when we stood here.
In splitting the product into two parts, a receiving part that we can offer to the networks, and then a secure wallet part, which is offered to the payment service provider that is serving end users like you and me, so we can pay. By splitting it, it makes the world of difference. The whole industry is not foreign to this because this is how, say, the card network works. Mastercard, Visa, they are the ones who accept payments and process it. It is the banks that offer sort of our end users the ability to pay on that network. It's not a strange idea. When I broke this, I went to Bangkok just a week after when we released the report. The response was overwhelming. I had one night in Bangkok, as we thought it was fun to write.
Arrived in the morning, went to this conference, pitched this idea. I had so much good conversation and a truckload, as I said to Patrick, of leads coming back. He asked me, "Do you have any leads coming back?" I said, "Yes, I have a truckload of leads." Overwhelming response from really all parties, really. It's been really well received. I'm very happy about that. Yeah.
Could you just also explain a little bit about the actual product and how you go about it? How should you think about the terminal solution and the service provider wallets?
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah. The network, as I said, what they do as a network, they accept payments. In Swedish, that's the inlösare. They take in payments into their network and they process it. They need components to do that. One component we have in the front end is called a terminal. That could be integrated into the network as part of any payment app. If you can pay online, you have something from the network that the network has put there in order for them to be able to accept an online payment. Into that same environment, in India, it's called the common library. We can put software, which we have, which enables them to also accept our layer two payments. It's another layer. Our type of payment is a layer two payment.
That means anyone who can pay online, that means everybody who's onboarded, they can also receive our layer two payments. That is how we put our terminal into the network. We can also put the terminal into host devices. Even into car terminals is possible. That would be gradually to get that into. A great start is to get it into the common library because that means that anyone who can pay online can receive offline. On the other hand, on the paying part, this is where you need secure wallets because it needs to be a wallet and it needs to be secure. If it's not secure, you can sit at home, Martin, and create your own money. That's not too hard to do. You don't, yeah, you have to be a hacker.
I don't know if you are, Martin, but you maybe, I'm sure if someone breaks it, then they would put it on the internet. This is how you do it. At least on dark web, you can see, oh, this is how I can sort of break the system. You need a secure wallet so you can't double spend. That's the term used in the industry, meaning that you have money and you spend them, but then you spend it again. You double spend. That needs to be secured. That part is offered to the payment service providers that are serving you and me. What we've done, that's the whole thing we announced in Q1, which has had this great response. The terminals should go to the network. The wallet, the secure wallet, should go to the payment service providers.
Could that be a bank or?
That's typically a bank, but it could also be, in India, actually, I don't know if you're aware, but they do 20 billion transactions per month, which is huge. I think it's much more than Mastercard does globally, just in India alone. The majority of those payments, I think it is probably 80, 90%, is not done by banking apps. It's done by Google Pay, PhonePe, Mobikwik, Amazon Pay. They're not banking apps. They are sort of, what's it called in India, third-party application providers. They always use a bank in order to process those payments, but they front for the end user. They have a very nice sort of payment app where they give a lot of perks in terms of loyalty and things like that. People like to use those apps.
Of these 20 billion transactions, probably 18 billion per month is done by not the banks, by those third-party applications.
Can you just, you mentioned layer one, and I mean, in the text, there's layer two. Could you just explain how does it work with all the layers and the?
Yeah. If you think of it, the whole payments world is sort of, it's layers. There are always layers upon layers. It's there. We have also a layer. We have a layer two. We have an add-on layer to the underlying payment system. There is a payment system that is, we call that the layer one. That is the underlying payment system. That is to do, in Sweden, that would be the Swish system. It's a layer one system. That's the underlying payment system. It has its own security protocol in order to process payment on the layer one. This is what everybody's used to.
There could be different layer ones in?
Every single payment system that you know, this could be central bank digital currency systems.
That's also a layer one?
Yeah. All the underlying payment systems are layer one. That could be of different kinds. There could be stable coins, it could be cryptocurrency, it can be CBDC, it can be a real-time payment system like Swish or UPI in India. It could be of any kind. Card networks, they're also there, they are layer one as well. That's a layer one. A layer two system is an add-on system that, in order to bring additional features to the underlying layer one system.
Like security?
Like security, you could say that what we bring is resilience. Even if you don't have connectivity, or even if something is down temporarily in the back end, you could still pay. You have resilience. Right now, in layer one system, typically, if there is no connectivity or something is down, you are then denied. You can't do a payment. You are denied. You can't pay. What we bring as a layer two system for, say, a real-time payment system like Swish in Sweden or UPI in India, we bring resilience. India is doing 10,000 transactions per second. If UPI, which it has been during Q2, has been down for hours, you can just imagine how many Indians are standing there trying to pay and can't pay. 10,000 per second is some sort of average, really. It's many Indians. We saw a big breakdown in Denmark.
You heard of the Nets breaking down. They're all over the place. Now we have to have resilience. Last year, the Microsoft bug, that they call it, hit Singapore, one of the most connected societies in the world. They contacted us. We know we need resilience. We need to do something. This is the banking association. We thought we could have just happy flow working when everything works. It's not enough. I think in an unsecure world, you need resilience. That is one thing we bring. As we actually talk about a little bit in this report, we bring other features as well. Resilience, I think, is one of the key ones. It's a key word in a more unsecure world as we have currently. In Sweden, for instance, we have our tax on bank ID.
With our layer two system, we can make payments without bank ID, obviously, because bank ID, you need online connectivity. We have a security protocol that allows payments to be done without bank ID. Essentially, layer two and layer one, the relationship is this. The layer one is the underlying payment system, has its own security protocol for typically online transactions. A layer two has its own security protocol in order to be able to work without the underlying network. It has a different security protocol. That's how the layer two is set up. We come with our secure wallet with another security protocol, which needs to be there because otherwise, you can't trust those things in a complete offline mode. It's a different security protocol. That is what differentiates layer two from layer one.
As for me, as a user, I'm a different player from layer two. Layer two is where you operate.
For a user, it should be seamless. You shouldn't have to care. You should just be able to pay. Your payment application that you've got from either your bank or a third-party application provider should route your payments. Right now, you don't have connectivity. All right, you pay over layer two. If you have connectivity, you can still pay over layer two, but you could also use the happy flow of layer one. You shouldn't, the end user shouldn't have to think about it. It should just be seamless.
I see. Regarding your product you're offering, is it different from before or have you added new features or developed a new product?
No.
Everything that you're offering now is the same.
It's the same. It's very much the same. I think this new go-to-market strategy, before we came with a whole system and we tried to sell it to, say, payment service providers like a bank, we did that in 2023. We had a successful pilot with HDFC and IDFC under guidance of RBI . We realized it needs to be in the ecosystem as well. We went to the ecosystem, the NPCI , and talked to them. That didn't work either because they don't want to pay for the wallets. Now we're just taking the same system that nobody wanted of those two roles, broken up into parts, and we can offer the receiving part to the network, which is what they do. That's their responsibility, and the paying part to the payment service provider. It's the same product.
It's more of a new product packaging. That is what underpins or underlies this new go-to-market strategy. All our patents still are valid. The product is what it always has been. There's no extra on that side.
Yeah, I see. In the Q2 report, you state that the NPCI has adopted your new approach. Is this a done deal?
Yes, it's a done deal, but they have taken the approach. We were, as the only, actually, third-party vendor, we were in, we were part of a kickoff meeting, which was two days ago, where they had invited the, say, leading banks for this story or this new architecture and told them about that this is now what's going to happen. We were there. What is still missing is NPCI, they're talking to us. We have said, "You could use for free our formats, our standard that we have." I shouldn't call it a standard, our formats. That means how does this, how do we communicate offline between a wallet and another wallet or a wallet and a terminal? How do we communicate to the backend? Everything is there. Everything is working. We have quite a feature-rich set of functionality. You can use all that.
We have given them both a technical proposal and a commercial proposal saying zero cost for you. Right now is the discussion, would they like to take that on or would they rather say, "We want to either develop something on our own or maybe with our help, develop something which is a bit different from us?" They don't see in favoring us as one vendor. We are certainly far ahead into it. What they've taken on is the approach. Yes, with this split of that they should have the receiving component in the network and wallets is the responsibility of the payment service provider. They're bought into that. That's a done deal. Right now is the discussion is how to do it. They have called us for a meeting either next week or the week after for a kickoff meeting for doing pilots.
We are moving towards that right now. Right now, they haven't responded yet to our commercial proposal. We put the bar low because we're saying, "You have it for free.
Could the agreement with IDFC FIRST Bank be a part of this pilot testing, or is it just a separate?
Oh, it would definitely be. IDFC was certainly there at that meeting. IDFC is 100% behind us. They were present in this meeting. IDFC have already agreed with us. They would like to be because they already have already our wallets. That's on the other side. IDFC is 100% behind this.
How would you go about with the IDFC FIRST Bank now then? You renegotiated some terms in the agreement or?
As you remember, in 2023, we did this pilot together with IDFC and HDFC. We got IDFC as a customer. That was in June 2023. It was a two-year deal and that's actually expired in June. They've been a bit slow in just, and that's simply because I think of our administration. They have already now decided to renew.
Okay.
They have renewed and they will pay us more money now, and we will revenue recognize that over another 24 months.
Okay.
We'll take it in piecemeal. That's already, we've got the money now, but we will revenue right now. That is already a done deal. What we are hoping for is that the difference between what happened in 2020 or where we were in 2023 is that there we didn't have the network with us. Now the network is behind this. This means that IDFC could scale out, add more users because now we have the network. The solution that they implemented has been this telecom solution where they connect from a secure wallet to their own backend. This is the telecom solution, and they can do that on their own. They couldn't do any proximity payments to someone else. Now when the network is there, everybody can receive our layer two with a store terminal. They can pay to anyone. That means that this could go much.
Yeah, I remember they had some problem with the iOS or Android system. Was that connected with their own?
I don't know what it is now.
They solved it a year ago.
Yeah, I know what you said, that it took them some time in order to have this telecom solution with SMS approved. This is what we're talking about now. It's less of a telecom solution where they connect from a wallet to their backend. Now we're talking about a full offline solution in layer two where they pay from their wallet either to the terminal, which is in the common library, or to another bank's wallet.
You don't have that issue in the.
No, that was more of a link to SMS. That was right now the focus is more on full proximity for IDFC as well.
I see. How will you price your solution?
Networks, this is something we've come to, that if we go to a network and we get them behind us to do this integration, put the terminal into their common library, they will have to have a gateway in the backend because the terminal needs to talk to something in the backend. We've said we do that for free, so there's no commercial.
Free of charge for the network provider.
For the network provider, yeah. There are many network providers. National Payments Corporation of India is sort of one. This is where we want it to be for free. Where we want to monetize, where we need to have revenues, is from the payment service provider on the issuing side, the ones that provide you and me with wallets. There we could have the model that we have with IDFC , that we have a charge, which is a per annum charge. It's a low charge, but it's a per annum charge per user per annum. Alternatively, we can look at revenue sharing models. It doesn't have to be a fee for the payment service provider. One example, an easy example would be, say that they are able to charge the end user a small amount per annum. We could share that.
That means that the bank would actually make as much money as we for.
Implementing the solution.
For implementing the solution, it's not a cost for the bank. It could be a revenue sharing. There are other ways to do revenue sharing as well. I think the baseline structure we have is the model we have with IDFC , which is roughly SEK 1 per annum per user. With IDFC , they have said to us they want a pricing model up to 20 million users. That gives us SEK 20 million , which covers our cost with one customer. This is the fantastic upside we have potentially in our company. What we have always wanted is that the network can accept our type of payments, and we are there now. This is the done deal.
Right now, we are talking about whether they are going to use our formats, use that as a standard for them, or if they are actually coming up with something on their own. We don't really care. We would like them to use ours because we don't have to adapt to any standard then, because our format would be the standard. If they choose, it's not a big deal because there are two reasons for this. It's not hard for us. It's just a translation from what we do to their format. That's one. The other thing is that we have patents. Patents protect us really well here because what they have agreed to, this done deal, it's the approach of reserve, pay, and settle, which is fundamentally patented by us. It would be hard for European, American, and a lot of payments companies are coming from those areas.
Because we have a U.S. patent, because we have a European patent, also now validated, that will happen also in Q2, certainly in the European one. That means that a European player in this reserve, pay, and settle approach cannot offer that anywhere in the world, including India. That means that we cut out from this. I would just say they can offer it, but we would ask for a royalty then. That's what you can do. If any bank would choose a competing solution from jurisdictions where we have patents, we will ask that bank that they have to pay us a royalty because they are not allowed to use that according to patent rules. Even if we don't have the Indian patent yet, the Indian patent, if we get that, that will give us even more strength in India.
From Indian competition?
From any competition in India. Any competition. Right now, we can exclude competition from U.S. and European players, which is good because there are some of our closest competitors that are from those jurisdictions.
Speaking about the regions, I mean, India is your main focus at the moment, but this approach must have been well received in different parts of the world.
Yeah, yeah. I would say that this is now when we have this new approach, that we have this turnaround that we talked about in Q1. As I said, we've had an overwhelming response and we've been talking to other big countries as well. We're talking on a national level, just like we talked national level on India. Big countries as well who see the opportunity that they can nationally make their networks resilient. They leave it to the market to sort out getting wallets to the payment service provider. We could be one provider, but it could be others as well. They like that idea because we are not, it's not everywhere in the world. We have one major country in Africa. We don't have a patent there. We will exclude European and American because we can do that thanks to our patents in those jurisdictions.
Otherwise, from other jurisdictions, we could have competition. I would be fine with that. What we can help them with is to put in our system into the network. We do it for free. You can have our format as your standard. You can have a sliding start. You can do it quickly. They open the market for healthy competition on the wallet side. They like that. We're not locking them in.
Speaking of competition, are there any other players with a similar approach or something with an alternative that?
The reserve, pay, and settle that we have always had as our approach is the major competition. It has been with hardware, secure element solutions on that. They've been saying, because they've been thinking of offline as something, it needs to be, you know, absolutely Fort Knox security. Only hardware, they claim—I would argue with that—but they claim only hardware can do that because their model has been, "Okay, I have something I can spend now. And it has to be so secure and I can pay it, you can pay to me, and I can pay it forward." Their whole model is that you can just fund your wallet with some money. You can pay it, and you can pay it, and you can pay it. Then whoever receives that at the end here can defund.
It is a flow where you fund your wallet, even in offline mode, you move it. For that reason, they say it needs to be Fort Knox security. What we are arguing with our reserve, pay, and settle is that it has to be a settlement step. Every single transaction needs to be replayed online in order to not contaminate the core ledger in the layer one system. I was very pleased that Bank of Canada, who is actually quite knowledgeable, they have been looking into this. They are recommending an approach from MIT, the Digital Currency Initiative, DCI from MIT. It's called two-phase commit, Open CBDC two-phase commit. It means that you do a transaction between wallets. That is the first phase. Then before you commit this to the core ledger, you need to validate this online.
That means that you need this layer two approach because you do something first on the second layer, and then before you put it on the core ledger, you really need to validate it. This is sort of what we have patented, this approach. This is now what even Bank of Canada came out with. This was just a month ago, stating that, and I think I have a link for that somewhere in the report. It's really good for us that the industry is now, and I'm happy about that, they are validating the approach that we've been taking. The IMF report, the International Monetary Fund, they came with a report in that was just early August. They say hardware-based solutions are not scalable. It's a challenge to scale them, and it is. We've been saying it all along.
We can work on hardware, but we choose not to because it doesn't scale. We have chosen to take a virtual secure element in software. It has that isolation, secure wallet that you need, but fantastically, it scales. Anywhere an app could go, this can go as well. Not at all the case with a hardware-based solution. We've been on the forefront for this all along. Everybody else has been talking hardware. We've been saying, no, no, no, it should be a virtual secure element. I was happy that the IMF report, this is quite a heavy body. This is the International Monetary Fund. This report goes to all central banks in the world who are looking at CBDC projects and so on. Having now that in black and white, hardware-based solutions are very challenging to scale. We've been saying that for years.
We are the only one who has a viable, secure, and scalable solution. If you look at our reports, we've been talking, but we've been a little bit alone saying this. Now we have the International Monetary Fund saying that. As I said, the Reserve, Pay, and Settle, Bank of Canada, MIT, with the two-phase, there's so much validation happening right now. The Central Bank Standards Organization, they are advising to a lot of central bankers. They are seeing the problem that the central bankers are having, not having implementable solutions. They can do hybrids on one phone or something, but who cares? It needs to be something that scales to the population. They have different phone models. That's why I think we haven't seen any major success with CBDC systems. They are 100% on our side that, thank you, Crunchfish.
You seem to have something which is a light in the tunnel. They're going to help us to get to that.
Organization you became sponsored for.
Yes, that's also happening to you too. It's sort of a fresh organization.
Advisory or?
If you think of it, ISO typically sets standards, and they set standards in all areas. Everybody heard of ISO standards, but it works quite slowly. I think before they have agreed to who's going to be on some standards body here, this is a private initiative, which they have seen that the central bankers actually need help with standardization. One reason is for interoperability, and also, what is best in class? What smart solution should they have? They need help. They are a bit confused because they've been told stories of the hardware selling companies, which hasn't been great, I think. I think they are a little bit, "Oh, what should we do?" They are trying to put up new standards in the market, and this would help a lot. It's a private standards organization, but they are getting momentum.
I think they will move much faster than the global ISO organization. That's why we choose to join them.
I see. In this perspective, how does the RBI address these issues compared to, for instance, the ECB ?
RBI understands that, I think, implementation-wise, the RBI relies on their sister organization. It is a body that the RBI has created a few years back, the NPCI . NPCI would front. They are the mother of all networks. The NPCI operates them, and they have been asked by the RBI also to operate the CBDC initiative, the digital roofing. The RBI oversees everything. I think this is also from the NPCI . A software-based solution is a must. India has so much fragmentation when it comes to device models. I think it is a non-starter. The hardware companies have not played there. The good thing here is to think of it. Right now, they are smart.
If they do not have to pay anything as a CBDC provider to get the ability of the network to receive, they pay nothing. It is going to be up to the market on the payment service providers to get wallets. What did the ECB do? They put a big project and they are taking European tax money and they are going to buy wallets. They have said that they are going to spend EUR 220 million- EUR 660 million to buy wallets. They are the only one in the world who have actually committed that kind of money. What they can do instead, instead of going to this hardware-based solution that they are dreaming about, which I think will be challenging, to say the least, they can get our system for free.
Everybody can receive in Europe, and then let the deployment be for the payment service provider. They are the ones who get wallets. We have already shown this for the ECB . Hang on. We have already shown this for the digital euro. We were part as pioneers in Q1. We implemented it into the digital euro system. We have already done that. They have invited us in, I think it is the 26th of September, for a session where they will present some of the best ideas that they had for what is called conditional payments. Martin, what is a conditional payment? It is an online payment, typically. In order for it to settle, conditions have to be met.
In order to automatically be able to settle, they need to reserve, if you are going to do a conditional payment, they need to reserve your money because otherwise, they cannot trust that the money will be there when they are going to settle. What is this? It is reserve, pay, and settle. That is our approach. It is just that we have applied conditional payments to offline. They have thought of it as online, but we have extended it for offline as well. If they now, they have already, we show it already, they have an easy way out to actually show they can have resilience on the digital euro system with us instead of hoping that they can have scalability and spending all this money on wallets that they should not pay for.
Would you think the ECB would anticipate the RBI to implement their, if they, if NCPI , accept your solution and get it rolling?
Not if they have accepted it.
Yeah, they have accepted it. Do you think the ECB will wait to see and see?
No, no, not necessarily. I don't know what the ECB will do. I can't speculate. I do think that if we get India, half of the world's real-time payments, this is sort of UPI type of payments, Swish payments, half of that volume happens in India. India is on the forefront. If we can make it in India with this approach, I think that will give echo anywhere in the world because a lot of people are looking at the tremendous success of India in payments. I think the ECB will look as well. The good part is that we have already shown it with our approach. One thing the ECB hasn't, I think, understood yet is that they can have it for free. That will be an interesting one because we're quite willing.
One thing that also has happened, I don't think Patrick wrote about that when we talked about what we do, a major German organization has approached us. They even came with a delegation during July. They are close to the Bundesbank. They are also understanding that the approach of hardware and complete offline solution and all that Fort Knox security is not a good approach. That organization gives us, and they will definitely, they want to help us, not just in Europe or in Germany, but also elsewhere. That is a very promising offer. It would be fantastic if we can crack the European market as well. We have a chance. We've already shown it. 26th of September, I mean, Milan, I think it is, at a ECB -organized event to show this pioneering solution for conditional payments.
Yeah, interesting. Let's return for a little bit to India.
Let's go to India again.
Again.
I thought we just left.
Yeah.
We're back.
Now, we've got a question that we touched upon regarding patent application and the process. Could you tell us anything about the actual process for the patent in India?
In India?
Yeah.
Yes. We have everything, we have all our patents, we always want to nationalize them in India. We have about 15 unique innovations in this area. The two first ones that we first entered into the Indian patent system, because what we do, let's take a step back. We apply for a patent. We typically apply in Sweden. Then after 12 months, we can apply for what's called an international patent application, PCT. There are about 200 countries in the world, or a bit less like that, but something like that, who have all agreed that if you apply for a PCT, an international patent, then you could wait in our country until it's gone 30 months, two and a half years after your initial application before you have to nationalize.
The international patent application provides you with 18 months before you have to decide whether you want to take this one to our country. It gives us a little bit of time. Everything we have done, we always include India for nationalization. The two first ones that we had were our original one from January 2020, but also something from early 2021. They have been, we got responses back and they have called us for what's called, you typically have some writing back and forth. In order to settle things, they typically, sometimes they invite for a hearing, in Swedish, monthly for handling. This is where you actually, in order to go a bit quicker, you sit and discuss. You understand what they're saying and we can clarify them instead of having back and forth in writing. We have been called for two of those in early August.
One was unfortunately, one was in late July, but that was canceled because he said he's on leave, which we thought was weird, but we realized his problem is sick leave. That one hasn't been rescheduled for a later day, but it could have just been sick leave. Everybody can get sick, so no worries. That will come. This is the one where we have a patent in the U.S., in Europe. That's the one we, and I think you have a good chance to get that in India as well. There is another one which was scheduled for a week later. This is our interoperability patent. That one went ahead. It was a good discussion. We have already responded with his remarks and I expect a happy outcome quite soon. It's now back in their court.
We have given them sort of what we heard from what they would like to grant us patent on and what we didn't. We're quite happy with the scope of that patent. We're hoping that the first one will be granted. This will be our first Indian patent. We have another 14. Our approach, the reason we can have so many innovations here, is that we've been unique. You can't patent something that anyone else had thought of, but we've been unique. We are providing a lot of IP here and we are protecting it in key markets: Europe, U.S., India typically, Brazil, some of the big markets.
Thank you for clarifying. I encourage all viewers to keep sending questions and we will address them as we go along. You mentioned in the report a pilot project with the RBI regarding offline payments with the digital rupee.
Yes.
With a couple of banks, could you tell us a little bit?
This is this project with NPCI .
Yeah, oh yeah. There's not only IDFC FIRST Bank. There's a lot of.
We have already, RBI is actually, well, the piloting banks who want to do now offline payments with a digital rupee. We have already IDFC in our court. They have our solution. They've paid for it and everything. We have opened up discussions with other piloting banks. That's been actually advised by, some have been advised by the NPCI saying, talk to Crunchfish. The RBI has been saying, "Crunchfish is part of this. You can talk to Crunchfish." We've been referred to. Gagan, our colleague who was at this meeting in Mumbai the other day at the NPCI , had three meetings with the participating banks that came to this meeting as well. Yes, it's beyond just IDFC . It is with other banks as well.
You mentioned actually one or two early implementations that you expect.
Yeah.
Shortly. Are they the same size as IDFC ?
Money-wise, IDFC is Mickey Mouse. They have just, again, what they are renewing now and what we had was just for 100,000 users. That's because, again, this is only for a pilot and it's only for, in a way, without having the network behind us. We hope to scale this up with more size when, for the first time, we have now the network with us. We're hoping for bigger size. It could start with that they say, "Let's start with 100,000 users." We will start there. I think the potential, when we now have the network behind us that they have agreed to this approach, the potential is for a much more, yeah, accelerated scale-up than otherwise.
Also, in the report, you have quite an extensive comparison between payment systems, which is potentially EMD code and real-time payments on mobile devices. You have a table where you list, yeah, and check boxes. Do you see them as competitors or potential clients?
What we show there is really that we have, yeah, we did quite a detailed analysis of how is the system to implement, how is the security, and what is the overall design of the system. We're comparing it with real-time payments, as you say, like Swish, UPI, who are, they tend not to be online at all. They have very low resilience. It only works when everything works. We also looked at EMD codes , as you said. This is mobile card payments and also smart card payments. We also looked at CBDC systems. This is on the right of our column. I put ourselves as the number fourth column, simply to, you can easily look at sort of head-to-head comparisons. We are a layer two. All these systems are layer one. We could complement any of those systems with our layer two approach.
I would say maybe not with the smart card because that is more of a form factor. It was interesting to put that in as well. We could be, for Swish, for UPI, we could be that resilience factor for them. For a CBDC system that they have already done, they have done the layer one, the underlying payment system. They have that in India. They need security in order to then process offline. We could be that secure wallet as a layer two to that. Typically that wouldn't really be there, certainly not if they do it in hardware. It will be there as a security, but it won't be there for scalability. They're looking for.
You need both.
They need something like us. We've done this comparative. Short answer to your question, any of those systems are underlying systems which we could complement with our layer two system because we have decided not to become an underlying payment system ourselves. We always see ourselves as a complement to whatever payment systems there are. We're giving four examples, but there could be others. It could be crypto systems, it could be stable coins, it could be mobile operator networks as well. There are many kinds of networks. We are a layer two potential for any of those, and we can bring them working together as well, which is a really interesting part that I'm sure people will hear more about. The hottest thing right now in the payments industry is to connect networks over stable coin. That is happening right now.
Stable coin becomes the bridge between different payment networks. What we do is that we can bridge as well, but we can do it in the front end between wallets. They bring things together in the back end. We are an interoperable solution with patents for that in the front end. We're not just about resilience, we're also about interoperability and a whole lot of other things. I think these two are actually key. I'm sure I'll talk about that in some of my conferences that I'm heading to during this autumn. Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit about the figures.
Yes.
First of all, the company will require new funding by the end of 2025.
If we don't get revenue.
If we don't get revenue.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a bull.
There still is. We certainly haven't given up that idea.
How will you structure such a fund if that will be?
Yeah, we have proposals on the table right now. We had a board meeting as we always have before the report. We discussed the various routes forward. We have prioritized what we want to do. What we've said, and it was funny because I had a lunch talk two weeks ago, and I think I was absolutely clear that the last thing we want to do is to go to the stock market and ask our shareholders for more money as at a rights issue. Still, someone told us that on our discussion on the forum, everybody believes that we will do that, which I thought we were abundantly clear that we don't want that. I still want to say that. That's certainly what we said at the board meeting. That's what we want to avoid. We are looking at alternatives.
We do not want to do a straight rights issue. Last year, we were pursuing an opportunity we believed in, but we suspect it was a fraud and we came into almost like a, we just had to take whatever we could because we were running out of money. That was very unfortunate that we had to wait that long. This year, we have started earlier. We have proposals on the table. We are evaluating them and we're going to discuss with them. Not at all are we discussing a rights issue. I don't know if I can make myself more clear than this, but this is not on the table. We are looking for other solutions. Absolutely.
Pretty clear, I'd say.
I'm not sure if this will be adhered to or listened to.
Anyway, looking at the Q2 figures, we saw that external costs were a bit higher than in Q1 and above all quotations. What was behind it?
Yeah, I think the biggest, if you compare Q2 2024 to Q2 2025, you can see a big drop. You're absolutely right that I think the numbers came in $800,000 higher in other external costs in Q2 compared to Q1. I didn't know why, actually. You found this that it was, so I had to ask my CFO about that. He said it's actually, most of it, $250,000 is that it was a cost that actually belonged to Q1 that we didn't record in Q1 properly. It came into Q2 instead. The difference is not $800,000. The difference is more like $300,000. We typically have a little bit higher cost in Q2. We have some more higher legal costs because of our annual report and meeting. I think it's actually nothing out of the ordinary.
The right numbers, we had already closed our books for Q1, but that should actually be $250,000 higher and $250,000 lower than for Q2. We had to take it in Q2 as we did. We didn't have it. It's because of our Indian subsidiary. There was something that wasn't picked up until in April. Sorry, yeah, in April. This is what happened, really.
More of a one-time.
It was more of an accounting issue than anything. It has nothing to do with that we have increased really costs out of the ordinary. Same thing. Yeah.
Talking about costs, personnel costs were slightly lower than what.
Personnel, yeah.
Personnel. Is this a level we can expect going forward?
Yes, I would say. You can see a huge drop compared to personnel in 2024, Q2, and that's because we don't have the gesture technology business anymore. Most of the effects for that have been happening here, but there were still some costs from yesterday's side in Q2 numbers. I don't expect it to be, in the short term, higher. Obviously, if we were to accelerate, we have more funding or whatever, right? Right now, we keep our, as we've always done, we've been very prudent with our cost, and we'll continue with that. I would say yes, unless we accelerate with more sales and marketing costs.
Thank you. Are there any more questions from the audience? I don't think so. Let's wrap things up, I think. Finally, could you list the top five activities for Crunchfish during the rest of 2025?
Oh, wow.
If you don't come up with five, you can.
Yeah, I mean, again, yeah, keep an eye on us on India.
Yeah.
You know, what we're doing there is great. We've got, NPCI has taken to heart. We've written a white paper together with them. I can comment on that. It was a great idea of the CEO of NPCI to just do a white paper. Right now, I don't, they may publish it someday. They may not. It has been circulated with RBI . It's been circulated internally with NPCI . I think he got our idea already in May. Not everybody else got it. He's a very smart man. I'm sure they've used the white paper in order to get consensus that this is the way we want to go. The white paper has, in a way, played a very important role. Whether they want to put it out, I don't know.
I think we should be happy that it has had this effect, that it's a done deal that they will go for this approach that we came with in May. Follow him, follow India. This will be key. Another thing to look out for is, I think, it's going to be interesting. The other big project is Europe for ECB . I think it's, that's up for, yeah, we are certain there as an outsider coming with our approach with conditional payments. I'm not sure where we'll end up, but I think we have a very compelling story. We will give ECB and European taxpayers a free solution, which should rather be paid by sort of participating banks processing for Europe. They should get their wallets. I think that's a very interesting project. We have very interesting discussions going on as well in other markets, major markets.
Don't be surprised if there will be announcements around that. We have also discussions with global organizations, again, that is getting, I'm having a, with a global payments organization, I'm having a, what actually is supposed to happen sort of a week ago, but they pushed it to early September. This is sort of with, I met them in Bangkok. They loved what they heard. They said we have to do a partnership and we want to do a technical deep dive. That's going to happen now early in September. Doing things on a global network level is, you know, keep an eye out for that. We will be busy. There will be a lot of things happening. You know, I had one night in Bangkok. It was a fantastic success. We're going to do, I think, five conferences to repeat the same. We will get the word out.
It will have ripple effects. We're very, actually, yeah, we're very excited about the future. The thing we need to solve, which I think everybody from who's been burned by a rights issue, that we, all of a sudden, we say, oh, it's going to be a rights issue. It won't be. I think we are taking this very seriously that we need to solve the financing. We understand, just like you say, worst-case scenario. What we want to do is to secure a longer runway. Right now, worst case, we have to the end of the year, which is not too long. We have started early. We started already actually in Q2 to look at alternatives. We have them on the table. We discussed it yesterday. We want to go ahead with that. This is to extend the runway because we firmly believe that we have a winner here.
We just have to secure enough financing so the revenue will come in so we will become cash-flow positive and not having to worry about financing as we always have had during our whole lives as the company.
I see.
I think it was fine.
Good job. Thank you, Joachim. Thank you all for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel, and you will not miss the next update from companies like Crunchfish. Thanks again.
Thank you, Martin. Thank you.
See you.