The interoperability layer is openly licensed
The Trust Layer is a reusable DPI architecture for grievance redress, fund recovery and instant payment system integration. Its specifications, schemas and documentation are openly licensed so that governments, central banks, IPS operators and their implementers can adopt and extend the model.
Three components, one capability
The Trust Layer spans the grievance redress management layer, the fund tracing and recovery layer, and the instant payment system itself. It is not a complete solution without all three. Each party’s deployable software, trained models and managed services remain separately licensed by that party.
Citizen complaint intake, structured case creation, classification, routing to responsible institutions and case follow-up.
Escalation to external tracing systems, collaborative track and trace of illicit funds, and recovery-status events.
The scheme itself — transaction reference formats, participant identification and timing expectations.
What is open, and what is not
No ambiguity to negotiate later. Every artefact in the Trust Layer sits in exactly one licence class, published up front.
Where the line sits: everything an implementer needs to build against the Trust Layer is open. What stays closed is each party’s own product — the platform codebase, the fine-tuned model weights, and the live fraud-detection parameters that would lose their value the moment they were published.
A joint contribution
Each party contributes the material it owns; the resulting standard is stewarded by the project rather than owned by any one participant.
- Redress case data model.
- Complaint taxonomy as a controlled vocabulary.
- Case lifecycle state machine — permitted states, transitions and transition conditions.
- Escalation-to-tracing API contract, and recovery-status event contract.
- IPS binding profiles — transaction reference formats, participant identification, timing.
- Transaction and participant data structures required for case handling and tracing.
- Conformance criteria.
- Trust Layer reference architecture, and the redress, recovery and IPS integration model.
- Complaint and case taxonomy guidance.
- Reference workflow definitions and templates, published as non-normative.
- Institutional and jurisdiction routing guidance, and reference operating procedures.
- Regulatory and implementation blueprint, plus country adaptation guidance.
- Training methodology: data collection and preparation only.
- Integration and deployment documentation for on-premise self-hosted deployments.
Why a specification licence, not an open-source licence: a specification is a blueprint implemented independently across many codebases, whereas an open-source licence grants terms scoped only to a contributor’s own contributions to a single codebase. A specification licence extends copyright and patent commitments to implementations of the specification as a whole, which is what independent implementers require.
No fee for eligible IIPS and DPI
The Proto & FNA Trust Layer platform is provided at no fee to qualified implementations. It is delivered as signed binaries and containers for on-premise or private client-controlled cloud deployment. Source code is not distributed.
Initial grant term
24 months
Continued use beyond the agreed term, or use outside the eligible scope, requires a commercial agreement with Proto.
is sponsored, mandated or overseen by a central bank, public financial authority, statutory IPS operator or qualifying development institution;
supports interoperable, low-cost and broadly accessible instant payments;
has an explicit financial-inclusion, consumer-protection or public-interest mandate;
serves low-income, underserved or financially excluded users;
is identified in writing by country, payment system, implementing entities and start date.
Included and excluded
Included capabilitiesCitizen complaint intake and conversational information collection
Structured case creation, classification and transaction-reference capture
AI-agent workflow execution — branching, conditional logic and variables
Routing to responsible institutions and case follow-up
Citizen notifications and case closure
Escalation to external tracing systems, and receipt of recovery-status updates
File and document knowledge base, master prompt and content controls
Ticket creation, ticket fields, tags, contact records and conversation history
Inbox review and reply
Workspace, team, role, permission, taxonomy and case-field configuration
Basic case reporting and data export
Channels: webchat, plus WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, LINE and email on deployer credentials
FNA's NFP Platform for Gates Foundation priority jurisdictions
Proprietary and commercially licensedSource code, for both Proto and FNA
Proto trained voice and low-resource-language models, and hosted model inference
Managed hosting and sovereign operations
Support, service levels and warranties
Live agent handover and workforce management
AI enrichment — summaries, live translation, sentiment analysis, inbox co-pilot
Advanced and custom analytics, and social perception
Automated team matching, general-purpose LLM actions, direct database access
FNA Money Trails product — Track & Trace and Case Portal licences
Granted deployments are provided as-is. Support, service levels and warranties come with a commercial agreement — most schemes move to one once they leave pilot.
Trust Layer against Enterprise
| Feature | Trust Layer | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| AI agent — workflow actions | ||
| Send message, file, carousel, survey | | |
| Collect feedback (CSAT) | | |
| Create ticket | Requires email config | |
| Jump, branch, set variable | | |
| Send API request | | |
| Auto team match | | |
| AI-agent, human and external handoff | | |
| Auto-fill field | | |
| Generic LLM processing action | | |
| SQL query | | |
| Knowledge and models | ||
| Knowledge base — file and document training | | |
| Knowledge base — URL and website training | | |
| Master prompt, content filtering | | |
| Open-source ASR / TTS | Optional, self-hosted | |
| Proto tailored voice models | | |
| Proto low-resource-language models | | |
| Proto hosted model inference | | |
| Channels | ||
| Webchat | | |
| WhatsApp, Telegram, email, Messenger, LINE | User credentials | |
| SMS | | |
| Inbox and repositories | ||
| Find and view conversations, message editor, reply | | |
| Transfers and takeovers | | |
| Tickets repository | | |
| People / basic CRM | | |
| AI summary, live translation, sentiment | | |
| Mediation co-pilot / Platform Advisor | | |
| Analytics | ||
| Basic ticket reporting | | |
| Interactions, chats, CSAT and workforce analytics | | |
| AI insights and social perception | | |
| Custom analytics | | |
| Enterprise administration | ||
| Users, teams, roles and permissions | | |
| Taxonomy, tags and custom fields | | |
| SSO | | |
| Whitelabelling | | |
| Database connections | | |
| Track & Trace and asset recovery | ||
| Collaborative track and trace of illicit funds | | |
| Recovery actions | | |
| Case portal and case management | | |
| NFP Platform | ||
| Module hosting and contract | | |
| Common data layer and exchange | | |
| NFP as a hosted service | | |
| API and hosting | ||
| Unlimited third-party modules | | |
| Workflow and interoperability specifications | Openly licensed | |
| Platform / Developer API | Limited | |
| On-premise / self-host | Qualifying IIPS | |
| Managed hosting and SLA | | |
Stewarded by the project
Contribution scope is agreed with the Gates Foundation, and roadmap and technical decisions are governed through an open project process with the Linux Foundation. No single vendor can change the standard unilaterally — including Proto.
The effort opens under the Community Specification process, a repository-based approach to standards development from the Joint Development Foundation.
FNA, the participating instant payment system and other implementers join as working-group contributors.
Roadmap and technical decisions are governed through an open project process with the Linux Foundation. No single vendor can change the standard — including Proto.
- Each party keeps its own name and trademarks.
- A granted deployment is your deployment — the licences do not let it be presented as operated, supported or certified by Proto or FNA.
- "Proto Certified" and "Proto Managed" remain ours to award.
- The Trust Layer project name and community assets can move to neutral stewardship under the host foundation.
The deployer provides and operates the hosting environment.
- Trust Layer platform services
- Relational database
- S3-compatible object storage
- Self-hosted open-source LLM
- Containerised deployment
- Reverse proxy with TLS
A self-hosted large language model is required for AI-agent functionality. Proto publishes a recommended list of compatible open-source models but does not distribute model weights. Voice is optional and disabled by default.
The Trust Layer’s specifications, workflows, documentation and interoperability assets are openly available for broad DPI adoption. The deployable platform is available for qualifying IIPS pilots, while production operation, AI models, enterprise capabilities and managed services remain commercially licensed.
Identify your implementation
Tell us the country, the payment system and the implementing entities. We will confirm eligibility and a start date.