All right, it looks like people can hear us, at least. Good morning and welcome to this webcast together with Crunchfish in connection with the company's report for Q1 2023. I'm joined here by the company CEO, Joachim Samuelsson, to discuss the report and the company's current situation. My name is Joen Sundmark. I'm an analyst at Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance, and I will be your moderator for today. As usual, I highly encourage you to send in your questions using the chat function as we go along, and I will then present the questions to Joachim for him to answer at the end. I also want to inform you that this webcast is being recorded and that the recording later can be accessed on Crunchfish homepage and on Västra Hamnen Corporate Finance YouTube channel.
Without further ado, thank you once again, Joachim , for being here. Always great to hear more about the quarter and the news. If we begin with the award from the Digital Currency Conference in Mexico City, first of all, big congratulations to the award. Could you tell us a bit more about what this actually means and how this could leverage the business in the future?
Yeah, we were very happy about getting it. I think it is a recognition that what we do is that we have a unique approach. This was an outstanding advancement in Digital Currency. I think the prize was to be awarded to someone that had advanced the way we look upon Digital Currency. The fact that we can, with our approach, have it in software, which it really is not what anyone else is doing. The current solutions out there is when we talk about CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, is to do an e-wallet, just here in Sweden, just like Swish, but it's sort of, you have a claim on the central bank instead of having a claim on a commercial bank.
It's just an e-wallet, and I don't really think that will fly because we already have in many countries these kind of solutions. To have a stored value on in your hand, what we are seeing is simply solutions on hardware. That's it really. That's why I think we had this play on that what the competition does in hardware, Crunchfish can do in software. It is significant, and I think it was really recognized at this conference that we are very unique in that position in the market. Here is a segment in the market looking at the central banks, and with this conference, I think we have established ourselves as a brand.
I don't think many, except the ones that we have approached directly were really aware of us. This goes with central banks, but it particularly also goes with the companies that most closely work with the central banks. That would be eCurrency, for instance, that we partner with. They were there. I met with Mitch Cohen again, who was working with the Bank of Jamaica. There were many others as well, like Ripple, Stellar, ProgressSoft, and all, are now very aware of who we are. That would be a good bridge to us, because they are the one that work closely with the central banks, because if central bank's gonna mint Digital Currency, they will need some sort of platform in the back end.
These platform need us in order to have a solution. I think we established ourselves nicely in the area of Central Bank Digital Currency. Next one, we're heading for Cape Town. The conference is Central Bank Payments Conference. It's in late June in Cape Town, and we will be there again. This time it will not just be me. We will go with the whole team to Cape Town. You might have seen that we, in this quarter we have become a chartered member of what is called the Central Bank Payments News. We have in our Q1 report here our article or a link to that supplement I did for this conference.
There's a new supplement coming for the conference in Cape Town, where I've updated our article a bit. Yeah. That will come out, and there will also be a public report, a public supplement. I'm really glad. We have a recognition in the market for having done something unique and, yeah, I think it's important for a small company like Crunchfish to get those kind of awards early in the beginning. I think it is.
Great to hear. Speaking about, you mentioned uniqueness. The title of the report, Crunchfish Create Blue Oceans, kind of related to that. What do you mean by this and its connection to your business segment, Digital Cash?
Yeah. It is creating a sort of blue oceans, for many years there is sort of in the market you talk about red oceans, blue oceans, and red ocean is, you are in a really competitive space. You're competing with everybody else, and it's cutthroat competition. People bite each other, and that's why the ocean is red. It's sort of full of blood basically a lot of casualties. A blue ocean is what you can create for yourself by creating with a new disruptive technique. You can create a new market space, sort of that where you are quite alone. I think we have the ability to do that, in the area of Digital Cash. The fact that...
We were early going for offline payments, but we're not unique in offline payments. There are others as well. The fact that we've done it in software is unique. I think it is superior because I think we should modernize payments now. Going back to just having it on cards, I think is going Ten years back. Being here very alone in the world right now, to be able to deliver stored value on an app, is a really great position to have. Because we were early understanding that it can be done in software, we have a lot of patents in this area which protects our position.
I believe with that patenting and our ability to take a bit of a risk and go against the stream, sort of, only dead fish follow the stream, but we go against the stream being a deep tech company. We create ourself a new market opportunity where we can swim a bit alone in that sort of, blue ocean. That's that certainly applies to Digital Cash, but it also applies to the area of gesture as well. I think our whole approach there have also been that particularly a lot of our competition needs a lot of hardware, a lot of big sensors in order to deliver high performance gesture recognition, and we do it in software there as well.
I think we are creating a bit of a space for ourselves in that area also that we can deliver great solutions just in software to the market. That will also give us a little bit of a space. Now it's time to sort of start delivering on, you know, great getting business in with the opportunity that we created for ourselves in these sort of blue oceans, really. Blue ocean is all about creating a market that you create on your own really, that initially is not crowded and you can get sustainable profitability in that area. It's usually very hard to do that in a red ocean, and I think we have the ability to do that.
That's, that's why, basically having in my CEO word, that we create blue oceans being this deep tech company, yeah, as we have talked about, in our annual report and other places.
Great to hear. Going to India that you also mentioned, I bet investors are very curious about the trip to India earlier this spring. Who did you meet there, what were the key takeaways from this trip?
We met with a lot of people. We started the trip meeting with the Reserve Bank of India. It's quite unusual that they meet fintech companies. They tend only to meet their the people that they regulate, meaning the banks. They are the central bank for yeah, basically managing the banks really. They did an exception. They met with us, and the story we came with them is that we really could help improving the Indian ecosystem with our payment solution. We told them about this product that we brought out in this quarter, Digital Cash telecom, which really would be an enabler, and what that is all about.
We were discussing where we were in the pilot that is running in the Regulatory Sandbox, and managed to, you know, strike up a, basically a good... We met them before, but I think this was, it was a good one-hour meeting, and that was the first meeting in the trip. After that, we met with the, yeah, was it 4 or 5 banks? We met with payment platform companies. we sort of really strengthened, I think, our again, our brand and our position in the market and people wanna work with us and we are pursuing those opportunities. It was a great trip. I did do a lot of blogging, I, on LinkedIn, one or two posts a day. I think a lot of people are quite aware of what happened during that trip. It was, I think the trip was a whole, was a great success. The main story I had was that, and that was also, that would be actually the title for the next central bank payment supplement, is that payment applications only work when everything works. Right now we are in a situation that all payment applications in the world are built in a way that they are designed for the happy flow. When everything works, your connection and all the back-end components are in place, you can make a payment.
If anything fails, it could be your connection or anything in the backend, then the payment fails. They all agreed during this trip that this is not the way it can be. Payment systems can't be built just for the happy flow. It really needs to be more redundant than that. I think we are delivering, yeah, a really important piece in that. That's important for Central Bank's Digital Currency, which needs to be resilient just like cash. It is also important for commercial payment services, because they will hopefully, I think, should get pressure on them that they need to be much more stable than what they currently are.
I think we have a solution for that.
The RBI sandbox the pilot is coming to an end. What can you tell us about the feedback received so far from RBI?
Well, we haven't received too much from RBI because, but we. This, the project, if we just give some background, is that there are two leading banks of India, it's HDFC Bank and IDFC FIRST Bank. They have put out and trialed a solution from us in the market for full offline payments. It is that the payer is offline and also the receiver is offline. This has been done under the supervision of RBI. RBI, they were very much part of it in the beginning to set the requirements. They requested that the project needs to go through penetration tests, meaning that they put third party hackers to try to crack the solution, otherwise RBI wouldn't have allowed it to go live. We passed that. It went live.
It's been running now for four months. We have seen stats during the whole process. It has been much more uptake than what RBI asked for, both on the user side as well as on the merchant side. Last week I actually saw. Now they're in a month of evaluation and I've even seen now a survey where they've asked this was the users, the payers, "What do you think of the service?" That was very positive as well. That, yes, they come in. These are the things that RBI is now collecting for their evaluation to understand whether this has been a success or not.
I think it is, and I think we have that in the Q1 report that it is what has happened this quarter, that we have a successful pilot now behind us. It's just wrapping up now during a couple of weeks here. I think officially it ended in 15th of May, and we are in these weeks of that RBI is putting together some sort of a report. That is what has happened. We're very happy because that's first time we've gone live, it's been real money, it's been thousands of users and all over India in all tiers. The top tier, which is the metropolitan cities to the sixth tier, where it's very rural. It's been tried everywhere.
That's what RBI is interested in because they, if you are in the RBI regulatory sandbox, the purpose is that you have an innovation that could affect the ecosystem. This is how it started with HDFC Bank. This is the leading bank of India. They wanted to do this innovation, but RBI said, "Well, if it's only you, then you can do it yourself. We are interested if you bring on another bank," they brought on IDFC FIRST Bank because then we are looking at payments which goes between banks. It's all gone well. I think we have a successful pilot now behind us, we're just waiting for RBI's report.
I, yeah, so RBI is not the one that really have been giving feedback so far. That will come now in this evaluation period or after that.
What do you believe is the next step in this project?
Well, this project will come to an end. I think what is important is what this means. What is the opportunity for this? There's things that happens in the Indian market which plays in our favor. That is that RBI have come up with something which is called PPI on UPI. That was a lot of acronyms here, PPI stands for prepaid instrument. A prepaid instrument is that where you can pay into a wallet. Think of PayPal, for instance. You can pay into PayPal, and then you can use PayPal to pay. PPI on UPI means that any e-wallet in India is now required to, that they have to be interoperable with UPI. UPI is the backbone for real-time payments in India.
There is a service and it's huge in India at the moment, or not at the moment, it will always be, I think, now. They do over 8 billion transactions on UPI. What they do now is to ask this, that PPI on UPI is that all e-wallets needs to be compatible, it needs to be interoperable, but it means that all e-wallets will be running on UPI, so they, you can pay on with an e-wallet anywhere in India. What we are doing now with IDFC FIRST Bank is that we are allowing for a PPI on UPI implementation in IDFC FIRST Bank, we are allowing that to use our telecom solution. The telecom solution is that you as the payer do not have to have internet connectivity.
You could pay by accessing the backend over telecom instead. We're gonna showcase that. Right now we are in production mode with, you know, working with IDFC Bank with that. We've also, with IDFC Bank as well, we also entered into, and we hope soon to be approved to be part of the second hackathon. We're gonna show the same thing for the e-Rupee. This is the CBDC project of India, which is live and we will be the ones that's gonna show how you could pay with e-Rupee even if you're offline. Currently it's an online wallet, you need to be online to pay. We're gonna showcase how you actually can do this offline, and I think that will have a lot of interest.
When we've done that, I think what's gonna happen is that the next step will be to really to talk to NPCI. Now it's another acronym. NPCI stands for National Payments Corporation of India. I have a meeting with them when I'm traveling to India in early June. They are developing the backbone for all payment services. UPI, they have the card service RuPay, they've done the backend for the e-Rupee. They are really the backbone for all the payment services. When we demonstrate now for the e-Rupee using... That you can be offline, an identical system is the UPI Lite. That is also an online balance that NPCI is providing, just like they're providing this online balance for the e-Rupee.
It's sort of a quite a small step for them to realize that we could possibly be the one that can help even UPI Lite then to be. That you can work offline. The step is not too far from also going for UPI itself, because the telecom solution, you don't need to have a reserve balance. You could just allow any payer on UPI to connect to the backend. Right now what excites me is that we have a path to access and to enable the entire Indian ecosystem with our technology. Before this PPI on UPI came, we were working with one wallet at a time, here is a path to the entire Indian ecosystem and then something that has happened in the market is this PPI on UPI.
When one wallet, could be anyone, we can show that we can payers on that wallet can pay offline, that will drive, I think, adoption on other e-wallets. We will showcase it for the e-Rupee, but then NPCI will stand there and think, "Well, why shouldn't we have this for UPI Lite?" Which is another wallet that they created themselves on the UPI rail. Potentially later UPI as well. Then we are, with our technology, enabling the next generation really here in India, where you can really pay offline. Telecom would be the first step. Next one will be to pay peer-to-peer, that I pay you, Joen, and you can pay forward. That is also just a solution that any issuer of a payment solution could put out.
Then third step would be to do what we have now currently done in this Regulatory Sandbox project, is to pay to a merchant that may have been acquired by another... Making it sort of work. That it will work. We have a path, we have a chance to, in the most advanced country I would say in the world right now for instant payment, they certainly have the volume. We have the chance for the whole thing, which is really quite amazing. With what we currently have done, we've shown how it is done in full payments, full offline solution. With a telecom solution, it's really an enabler because that telecom solution we have from the same...
You have the same environment on your phone to pay over telecom, where you connect to the host server, as you have if you are paying to someone in proximity, like a merchant. It's the same solution. It's just that the message that we send out from you as a payer, it is either it's directed up to the host server if it is over telecom, or we use some sort of proximity technique to pay in proximity to a merchant, and that could be Bluetooth or, as we have used in this project with the RBI sandbox, we use QR code actually to transfer the information across. We have the solution, and we have a real good shot at the market. I'll go to India now.
I will meet with NPCI, that's already scheduled. I will meet with IDFC Bank. I'll meet with HDFC Bank. I'll be at the big conference called the Payment Innovation Summit. I hope to get one of the product director from IDFC FIRST Bank to be co-presenting with me. I think we're gonna create some good noise about this opportunity and tell the world about this opportunity in. I think it will be. There will be. Yeah, we'll talk about what we've done with the regulatory sandbox, but more importantly I think we will also talk about what we are now doing, both for the e-Rupee as well as with an IDFC project, which is a PPI on UPI type of project.
Sorry for all the acronyms, but it's, yeah, it's coming together in a nice way. The fact that a small company from Sweden have a shot at improving the entire Indian ecosystem when it comes to payments is really great. I'm pleased where we are. The pilot behind us, but we're moving quickly forward now with more projects in order to augment the payment system of India so the payer could be offline.
Great to hear. In the quarter, it was also mentioned that Crunch signed an LOI to acquire an Indian payment platform company. What's the current status on this?
It's currently on hold, I would say. We have sort of stopped. We've done a lot of work, due diligence work. We have find things on the technical side that needs to be assessed. What we have understood is that we believe what they have done, we need to refactor, meaning that we think we have to rewrite. We didn't expect that, but that is what we feel. We need to assess how much of a complication is that for us, or not complication, but how much time will it take to do it?
We have sort of put it on hold, and we are in that discussion with them and trying to sort of assess that before we can go to closing. That's where we are with the that project really.
All right. If we move out of India to Nigeria, what has happened in this region since the last report?
For the central bank payment, or the central bank project, this moved. We were back in last year, we were in negotiation with them. They asked for quotes, and it ended up that we gave them a fairly big quote because they asked us for unlimited number of users. Then it sort of went a bit quiet for two reasons. It went quiet because of the election that there was a new president. That's typically with public institutions like the reserve bank then or the central bank would. Things happen then. That was almost expected.
The fact what I heard and I met, there were quite a few people from the Central Bank of Nigeria at the conference in Mexico, which I just attended. They were saying that, "Your quote, we didn't have budget for it. We're happy to come back to it, but right now, for this year, we didn't have enough budget." I started a conversation that, "Well, the problem was that you asked for just one price instead of having a staged... We could have gone in with you with a quote for not unlimited number of users, but for smaller amounts. You did ask for just give us just one price for everything." I hope that we can reengage again.
They certainly understood what we had at this conference in Mexico. I met with, yeah, I think they had a whole delegation there, or almost 10 people were there, and I spoke to quite a few of them who said that they will contact the responsible people that we were dealing with before, and I hope we will now start re-engaging again. In parallel, what we have done is with Sterling Bank in Nigeria, which is a private sector bank, they are also keen because Nigeria is a typical country where offline payments would make a lot of sense because the infrastructure is not there all the time that you can be online.
There we have, engaged in a private sector conversation, and I think that will be good for us.
I can see we have a question here from the audience as well. It says, "You still have a very lean company structure. Will there be need to increase staff in order to take care of opportunities that arises and also to address risks with very few key stakeholders?
Yeah, I think not substantial increase. I don't think we have to do. I think we still have. We wanna be smart on what we do, but there will be a time where we feel that it would be good to accelerate, right, even more. Right now, I think we are still very focused on trying to break through in India. As I said, we have a real shot at India. I think we need to still be very focused on what we do in India. We are starting to, the fact that I went to Mexico, the fact that we're going to Cape Town, we are working now both with marketing and sales to spread the word. We are doing that.
That still can be done with a very few people. As soon as we will get more traction, then we will scale up. We don't have to scale up linearly with the with revenue. I think we can still be quite small, but I think it would be a, make sense to scale up. The acquisition in India is also something it's also part of getting more resources really for our not just then marketing and sales, but particularly to have more developing capability and also support capability. That is still of interest to us for sure.
The report also shortly mentions Socio. Could you tell us about the current status on that and how the dialogue has developed during this past quarter?
Well, we, yeah, they haven't got their financing yet. I'm the first one to regret that. I really. It's sort of sad on them as well because they obviously need their financing. They are accessing financing for their operations, but it's not in order yet. They have, in principle, an agreement, and I've been in contact with them regularly, sort of, yeah, I would say twice, at least twice a week for a long time. It's always been that, "Well, we hope to have it ready, we hope to have it ready," but it's been pushed forward. It's been pushed forward now again.
I actually chatted with the gentleman in charge, and he said that, "The dialogue is there. We believe we will have it, and it is constantly just being delayed." It's been delayed from their side that. Obviously they can't make the investment in us if they don't have their own financing. That's what it is. I... Yeah, it's disturbing, I think, that, because when they came to us in November, they were sure that they would have it in February, and then that was delayed, and then, it's just been kept delaying basically. What we've done is to start alternative dialogues, with other parties. The...
There is interest from others as well, and that is plan A that we have for having additional sort of funding into the company. We will ask at the annual meeting today, we will have ask for a new mandate for, as we always do, this is. Most company would do that. They would ask for that the board, at its discretion, have available 10% of the outstanding number of shares. Currently, we have 33 million shares, so that would mean that at our discretion, we can direct 3.3 million shares to an external party. We will most likely get that.
I don't wanna go ahead of the annual meeting, but given that we have some of us as the main shareholders will vote in favor. It is, you know, very likely that there will be a new mandate for 3.3 million shares, and that will be a vehicle for us to finance. That could go to Socio partially, but there are also others. Right now there is no, there's no way that we have to do to Socio. There could be other strategic partners that would be interested to take on strategic, making a strategic investment into Crunchfish.
I see. As I said earlier, I encourage you to ask your questions using the chat function. Going back to operations though, within gesture interaction, the report also mentions how online shopping is evolving to become a third segment with potential. Could you tell us more about Crunchfish's role within this growing market?
Well, it's early for us, but it's interesting. You know, before we sort of had two segments. We had AR/VR. You don't have screens, so you need to interact with gestures. That is still very much there for us. We had automotive. This is a section that hasn't developed as quickly as we thought. We were approached by this Italian company, Change2, that we represent many of the major fashion brands to sell sort of watches and other things, and wouldn't it be nice if we could sort of be able to demonstrate our customers' fashion fashion watches with your technology. The team did just an amazing job.
They turned around something very, very quickly and what they, all the team was able to do as well was to put it on the web. Then you could go to one of these brands on their website and access that you... You don't have to download anything. You could just go to one particular website, and you can basically select a watch for you, and then you, by having your mobile phone, you could see how that watch looks on your hand really. It's really a virtual try-on that virtually you see how it looks. It's quite amazing. The fact that it opens up really a new territory for us.
Who will be first is this company Change2, who in turn have a lot of these Italian fashion brands behind them. I think this will make a big splash. The whole world here of e-shopping is picking up, and we have a technology here that is interesting, particularly for things like sort of a watch would be a good example where we can demonstrate it. We are very early because we are still in the phase of delivering the technology to this company, so it's just hard to see. I think this will be a third leg for us next to AR/VR, next to automotive, and then.
Exactly what it will bring is hard to say.
Right here. Another question here from the audience. What are your thoughts on the Samsung versus Bank of Korea offline payment cooperation?
That's an interesting one, because I think Bank of Korea have approached Samsung to try to deliver CBDC on the Samsung Galaxy. I think that they will run into our patent area very quickly, in my opinion. I think they would like to do it just like we think it should be done, that you don't really wanna have it on cards. You want to have it on smartphones. I think that that is a project to approach and talk to Samsung about what we have. We don't have patents yet in Korea, but we have international patent application that we still have the chance to sort of.
We will go to Korea and patent some core technology of ours. That will make it, I think, quite difficult for them to deliver a good solution. It might be that we can strike up a relationship here with Samsung here for this project. I noticed as well, it was an interesting project that came out, came out actually.
Looking forward, what can investors expect from the company in the coming months?
We, there is just a lot of things going on. We will be active, both at domestic conferences. I'll be at CDMA MedDagen, and I'll be at the Stora Aktiedagen in Stockholm here, late sort of May and early June. We will also be at some conferences. I'm heading to Mumbai. I'll be in Hong Kong the day after and then Cape Town. All that is happening in sort of June. A lot of more. We working hard right now to just create more awareness for our solution and our brand. In terms of sales, we have said that we believe in Q2 we will sign our first agreement. Most likely it will be IDFC FIRST Bank.
We are very far in that discussions. Commercially, we've given them a quote. I think that's passed internally. We are working with the legal people with. They had a good contract themselves that we could just amend with some of the clauses that we wanted to have in. We're really at the final stages with the IDFC Bank. HDFC Bank as well. There it has been a little bit back and forth. I actually thought that they would be the first one we will sign with, but that's for various reasons has been delayed. I'm meeting with them. They are the one that have really gone very public about having offline pay.
That agreement will, it will also close. I'm not sure if it will be in Q2, but, it will come soon as well. We will follow up. I think we have several bank, additional banks, in India that want this as a solution as well. The most important things is that we are getting traction with the RBI and NPCI, I think you will see us getting into hackathons for this solution, and we will do that with IDFC Bank. I think IDFC Bank will be becoming quite important. It's a very tech-savvy bank, I can tell that in our next webinar that we do in this series, Enabling Offline Payments in an Online World, the third panelist will be from IDFC FIRST Bank.
It's their product director who will join us there. I... this just shows in a way how closely we're working with IDFC at the moment. It's just a lot of things will happen. I think we will see things happening on the Gesture side as well. There are big players that like our solution on the AR/VR space. There will for sure be more announcements with this online sort of shopping as well. A lot of things happening in that area as well. We have changed that Joakim Nydemark has resigned from his CEO role in Gesture Interaction.
He will most likely be elected into the board today, and we will have a new CEO, Fredrik Clementson, and he starts on June 19th. He comes in with a lot of technical experience and a lot of energy and I think it's gonna be exciting to see what he can bring. I like the fact that Joakim Nydemark is still with us, so we will have a strong representation from the board side in the Gesture area. Joakim will coach and help Fredrik really to get a good start in this area. Things will happen there as well. I, yeah, I see expect basically us to move forward with just showing more and more things.
I know a lot of people, including myself, we're waiting for our first agreement. Wouldn't that be great? But I think every sign right now in the market, we're taking steps all the time, and I think All signs are important when you are coming with a new technology to the market. All signs are in our favor right now. Well, we are doing in milestone after milestone. Just this prize that we got is just yet another testimony of that people are starting to understand what we really have done in this area.
Seems like there's a lot of things going on.
Yes.
I can see there's another question here. You sort of touched upon it, but can you tell us anything about the negotiations on HDFC, forward slash IDFC? Is there any upfront payment, or is it only license, fees on use?
There will be a combination. There will be a upfront payment, and there will be license fees on use. These license fees on use could be structured in different ways. I think one way to do it is to do it per user. That could be one way. Another way would be to do it per transaction. I think right now the discussions, how they're going in with IDFC, we are talking about it per user. With HDFC, the discussions has been per transaction rather. This could be either, but in both cases, there will be an upfront payment as well.
Follow-up question to that, is there any timeline when the banks want to roll out?
I know IDFC wants to get this going as soon as possible. This is the one where we're doing integration right now for the getting their PPI on UPI, their wallet on UPI to have our solution. They want that as really as soon as possible. I don't think they wanna sit on it. They wanna be quick. I think that will start. Now we go into production mode, that will start for others to follow as well. We still have this major e-wallet they have been working to try to before their wallet didn't start unless you were online, and they needed to change that. We still have that dialogue going.
I think that now we have, with HDFC, we have other banks as well to follow and even gonna have this conversation with NPCI, which is sort of the backbone of the payments of India as well. I think there is just a lot of opportunities. This will be rolled out, yeah, as, yeah, one by one or. Hopefully, we'll get some breakthrough into the whole ecosystem. I think that what I'm quite excited about what we're gonna showcase here with IDFC Bank at the hackathon. Here we're gonna show for the e-Rupee, how that can work. There is a lot of other banks then that have this.
This could just be required by RBI that everybody has to have this. Again, that will open up a lot of opportunity quickly. As I said, this is the same solution that UPI Lite is, and it could go quickly into that area as well. Yes, there is no set timeline for, but I think IDFC FIRST Bank, who is working on this PPI on UPI, will go first, and that is very soon.
Great to hear. Another question here. Any update on regarding discussions with the ECB or the Fed or any other major central banks?
I met with quite a few. I met with representatives from ECB in. They want to now talk. When I was in Frankfurt at the conference, I sort of heard where they were, and they were at the solution that you have to be online if you are pushing a payment, just like we do here in Sweden with Swish, or you have to have stored value on a card. That's where they were.
I approached the gentleman from the Bundesbank who was close to this project, and I said, "Why haven't you understood that you can do it in software?" "Well, we haven't really looked at that." "No, but I think you should." Now I managed to sort of speak to people from ECB at the conference in Mexico, and they asked for a meeting, and that is great. I've also been added, and I talked to a few people from the Fed, Federal Reserve in the US as well, at this conference, so that starts that conference as well. We are also in dialogue with some others as well that I also met.
Again, we have a very unique position that if you think of it, if you're gonna do Central Bank Digital Currency, to only have a solution which is like Swish today or have it on cards is very limiting. And the solution that we bring that is so much more versatile, that you can connect over telecom, you can pay peer to peer between two smartphones, or you can exchange between a smartphone and a card. You can all do all that. We are the one who has that solution. I think that without having that, I don't think that there is a really a good implementation for CBDC that really will take off. We have that technology. I think the central banks are starting to realize that.
That's why we need to get the word out. That's why I went to Mexico, and that's why we're going now to Cape Town for this Central Bank Payments Conference to make even more people understand what we have. We're moving this forward. The good thing that we are not just have to wait with the central banks because it moves slowly as we've seen here in Sweden and in other countries as well. The fact that we can also work directly with the commercial banks with our solution like IDFC FIRST Bank here, for instance, in India, means that we don't have to sit and wait for policy decisions from the central banks. We can work directly with the commercial banks with our solution.
I think that will showcase what we can do, and then it will be an easier decision when the central banks are coming along and actually making their decision as well. That will come. There will be a lot of Central Bank Digital Currency in the world, and I think we have a strong solution or strong position for delivering there.
Nice to hear. It looks like we have answered all the questions from the audience. Unless you have something to add, Joachim, I want to thank you all for listening and providing with questions. I hope to see you again, hosting in the next quarter.
Yeah. No, thank you, Joen, for good questions, and thanks all. I just wanna thank everybody to who follow us, and I know there's a lot of interest. I think my ending word is that, yeah, we are creating blue oceans. We have created with our technology a new space in the market, and we're working hard to try to for others to really understand. 'Cause when you create a blue ocean, you're the only one that is peddling that. Everybody else are talking about card solutions or other solutions. I think that will not fly when that is what our competitors are telling.
We are the one that are telling this singing this song, telling this story, and we need to do that well in order for people to really realize that this is possible. We are, you know, getting it, getting there. We have showcased it with the RBI Sandbox project here that it can be done, and now we are deploying our telecom solution, which is not what we did in the RBI Sandbox, but we're gonna deploy that in India, and that's a great opener. I'm happy about where we are. I would have liked to see the financing from Socio already done as they had promised, but it hasn't been. I think we will be able to cope anyway.
I would have liked to see that we already had an agreement for sure. I think we have to look at agreements that would just be one agreement. When we've got that, people will ask, "Well, so where will you get your next agreement?" There will always be this constant progression of that we need to reach new milestones, and we are reaching the milestones all the time. I agree that an agreement will be a fantastic first milestone to get, and it's coming. It's just that it's taking a little bit longer than I think I anticipated. It's not that it's not coming. It's not like they have gone away from us. It's just that it's a slow process unfortunately with them.
We're getting there. We're getting there.
Thank you once again, Joachim . Hope to see you again soon.
Thank you all. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye.