KZ FOSSBhutan,
This is a prelim RFI for a FOSS Fintech meetup, focussed on QR payments. After a wild goose chase involving no open documentation from the RMA, I discovered purely by chance that the QR encoding on Bhutan QR and Singapore's PayNow use the same prefix - and this led me to the emvco QR code specificiations [1].
Further digging got me finally to the RMA one-liner about EmvCo spec compliance. [2]
Even NPCI has compatiblity via its "Bharat QR" [3]
So what's the relevance with FOSS ?
As with every "infrastructure" project, FOSS is the silent enabler - the EMVCO spec seems to have several FOSS experiments and deployments ongoing [4]
I have also noticed that there are PoS solutions in Bhutan that are quietly implementing QR generation, for eg: with each solution rolling its own code - this is wasteful, and not a useful business model moat.
It would be in the interest of the Bhutan fintech industry to come together and support a small subset of well documented and rigourously tested FOSS implementations of this spec, so that young entrepreneurs don't have to waste time re-inventing the wheel and focus on their business models and application related tasks, and existing players can have assurance that their codebases are high quality and bring down total cost of ownership.
If you are interested in this idea, please reply me privately, forward this email to people who might be interested, or signpost me - I am aiming to have a preliminary meetup where we can sit down and identify high quality projects using emvco spec, and then shortlist a few that we can then figure out how to modify to be Bhutan QR compatible.
I'm aiming to have this meeting in July, 2025, before the South Asian Network Operators Group meetup - this will bring a global Tech community into Thimphu ( please see their announcments and calls for participation on the BTNog Mailing lists).
Also, please tell your friends to "unspam" email from FOSSBhutan mailing lists, because this is causing the big email monopoly gmail to send our emails to the spam boxes of other gmail users too. Ideally, please just stop using gmail and find a more FOSS friendly mail provider.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best Wishes,
Math
[1] https://www.w3.org/2020/Talks/emvco-qr-20201021.pdf [2] https://www.rma.org.bt/media/Laws_By_Laws/Guidelines%20for%20Bhutan%20QR%20P... [3] https://fasterpaymentscouncil.org/userfiles/2080/files/QR%20Code%20White%20P... [4] https://github.com/search?q=emvco&type=repositories