Turnaround: Third Time’s the Charm
This quarter represents a defining turnaround for Crunchfish as we position ourselves to deliver on the immense promise of offline payments in India and beyond. Our journey to the solution that will finally resonate in the market has not been without its challenges. However, as the saying goes, “third time’s the charm,” and after two previous attempts, we now have a breakthrough strategy that we are very optimistic will succeed and scale effectively.
In our first attempt in 2023, Crunchfish partnered with HDFC Bank and IDFC First Bank to conduct pilot implementations of offline payments within the Regulatory Sandbox of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). These pilots demonstrated the feasibility of offline payments as a way to enable resilience, usability, and financial inclusion in environments with limited or unreliable network connectivity. However, scaling this solution proved difficult. Offline payments need to be embedded across the entire payment ecosystem to ensure that users and merchants everywhere can seamlessly receive payments. The infrastructure-level adoption required for such an ecosystem-wide rollout was missing, hindering the project’s scalability.
Our second attempt in 2024 focused on the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which provides the backbone of India’s payment infrastructure, including Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the Digital Rupee. Crunchfish sought to convince NPCI to adapt Crunchfish Digital Cash offline wallets for the Indian payment ecosystem. While the concept generated significant interest, it became clear that NPCI was not willing to mandate an all-encompassing third-party offline wallet solution for the entire ecosystem, as this conflicted with their need to have absolute control over the solutions that are deployed domestically to banks and Third-Party Application Providers (TPAPs). This reinforced us to rethink our approach again and strategize to find a better way forward.
2025 marks the third attempt and the turning point for Crunchfish’s strategy. This turnaround focuses on providing a solution that meets both NPCI’s needs and the demands of the broader payment ecosystem. Crunchfish has proposed an Offline Terminal Infrastructure (OTI), which integrates directly into NPCI’s existing payment rails, enabling the ability to receive offline payments as a fundamental feature of the ecosystem. Meanwhile, the ability to pay offline remains with banks and TPAPs, enabling them to assume the responsibility for the security of their mobile apps and an offline wallet, in-sourced from a third-party technology provider such as Crunchfish.
This new approach represents a holistic, scalable, and future-ready solution that balances NPCI’s need to provide and control a seamless infrastructure with banks and TPAPs’ ability to differentiate payment services. It is the cornerstone of our 2025 turnaround, setting the stage for widespread adoption and sustainable revenue growth.
Similarities with the Card Payment Infrastructure
This refined strategy draws inspiration from the infrastructure of card payments under the global EMVCo ecosystem, leveraging a tried-and-tested model for scalability, flexibility, and interoperability. In the card payment ecosystem, there is a clear separation of roles between:
Interoperable Acquiring Card Terminal Infrastructure: The network of card terminals is part of the EMVCo’s payment ecosystem’s foundational specifications and infrastructure, allowing merchants to accept payments regardless of which card issuer the customer uses worldwide.
Third-Party Issued Standalone Cards: Issued by banks or financial institutions, these cards have the ability to make payments, even in offline scenarios.
Similarly, Crunchfish’s Offline Terminal Infrastructure (OTI) functions as the interoperable acquiring infrastructure within the payment ecosystem, enabling merchants and other payees to reliably receive offline payments. At the same time, third-party offline wallets developed by banks and TPAPs retain the capability to make offline payments. This separation ensures the payment ecosystem remains open, interoperable, and scalable, allowing issuing banks and TPAPs to compete and innovate freely while relying on a robust, standardized infrastructure for interoperability.
We have proposed to the NPCI that the OTI framework should serve as the backbone infrastructure in India’s payment ecosystem, analogous to card terminal infrastructure, while enabling the banks and TPAPs to source in third-party solutions for customer-facing offline wallets. This architectural similarity ensures scalability and builds confidence across the ecosystem, as it leverages a model that has already proven successful for card payments globally.
Breakthrough and Future Potential
This 2025 turnaround approach represents several potential breakthroughs:
NPCI gains resilient infrastructure: Offline payments become embedded within UPI and the Digital Rupee framework, improving the stability and inclusivity of India’s payment ecosystem while ensuring interoperability across all participants. NPCI will still have full control of the schemes and specficiations.
Banks and TPAPs gain freedom to innovate: By retaining the ability to integrate third-party offline wallets for their customers, banks and TPAPs can compete and differentiate their service offerings while engaging with NPCI’s scalable infrastructure.
Crunchfish unlocks multiple revenue opportunities: Crunchfish benefits from two significant revenue streams—providing the OTI infrastructure for the payment ecosystem on a national or global basis and providing offline wallet solutions to the many financial institutions attached to these payment ecosystems.
India serves as the perfect launchpad for this scalable strategy, but the global potential is immense. For example, Crunchfish could be playing a pivotal role in Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) projects like the Digital Euro. As a pioneering partner to the ECB for conditional payments, Crunchfish is demonstrating offline payments with online settlement as an innovative use case for seamless, resilient, and conditional payments. Crunchfish way of doing offline payments with online settlement is particularly applicable as it shares an architectural foundation with conditional payments through the Reserve, Pay, and Settle approach:
Reserve: Funds are pre-authorized and held in an offline or conditional state
Pay: Payments are initiated offline or with predefined settlement conditions
Settle: Transactions settle online automatically when the pre-defined conditions are fulfilled, ensuring higher security for offline payment, regulatory compliance and accountability.
European Central Bank (ECB) plans that the Digital Euro should support conditional payments. This enables Crunchfish to offer ECB a fully functional, secure and scalable offline payment solution which is roll-out ready and already approved by RBI. With our initial patent for offline payments granted in the US, Notice of Allowance announced in the EU and Taiwan, and patent pending in India and China, Crunchfish holds the pole position in the race to capture this burgeoning field.
Conclusion
2025 is the year of transformation for Crunchfish. This third attempt may represent the breakthrough we have worked so hard for. If the Offline Terminal Infrastructure is integrated into NPCI’s payment rails, Crunchfish ensures that offline payments can scale across India while enabling banks and TPAPs to innovate and select third-party offline wallets freely. This strategy, inspired by the tried-and-tested card payment ecosystem, positions Crunchfish to adapt its model globally for CBDC initiatives and emerging offline use cases in commercial payment systems. Our perseverance, adaptability, and innovation will then ultimately pay off, and become a proof of “third time’s the charm”.
