SCF Protocol

Vietnamese tier-2/3 export suppliers wait 60–120 days for payment but need cash in 7–30. Banks can’t verify the obligations behind those orders, so factoring sits at 0.09% of credit and 150k–200k SMEs borrow informally at 24–36%. The money exists; the proof doesn’t.

A protocol, not a platform. Tier-1 buyers self-attest payment obligations as W3C Verifiable Credentials, so any bank can verify them — no phone call, no anchor-buyer ERP. Layered on top: an AI nudge engine, dual-key co-signing, progressive disclosure for privacy, and AI credit scoring for first-time borrowers.

I designed the Verifiable Payables Token layer and ran empathy interviews with an anchor buyer to ground it in real behaviour. I also led the ethics synthesis — arguing that selective attestation by powerful buyers needs an institutional guardrail, which became the VIFC sandbox.

A designed protocol, not a deployed one — and the token’s legal status under Vietnamese law is still open, which is why it’s scoped to a sandbox. The biggest lesson was human, not cryptographic: signatures fail if the buyer’s Purchasing and Finance teams aren’t aligned, so we built the behavioural incentives into the protocol itself.