Financial Innovation Lab → Virtual Financial Ecosystem
CEMI Labs · the Lab’s fourth proving ground
A digital twin of the financial ecosystem.
Ready for 2027, today.
Simulated counterparts of every institution a payment or financial application must talk to in the Dominican Republic — organized exactly as the Central Bank organizes the real thing. Real protocols, real message formats, real rules, invented institutions. No real person, no real money, no real bank.
What a digital twin of a country’s payment system is, and why the Lab is building one now.
A set of simulated counterparts of the institutions a payment or financial application must talk to in the Dominican Republic, organized exactly as the Central Bank organizes the real thing: the systems that make up the SIPARD, the participants that hold accounts in it, the payment-service providers the Reglamento recognizes, the payment instruments it classifies, the support entities around them, and the rules that govern the whole.
Each simulated counterpart speaks the real protocol and message format of its kind, keeps state — accounts, balances, cards, electronic payment accounts, cases — obeys the rules the Reglamento sets for participation, timing, limits, irrevocability and records, and can be put into failure and adversarial modes. A team plugs its application in and runs an entire process end to end, from onboarding to settlement in the simulated LBTR to a suspicious-transaction report, without touching a real institution, a real person or real money. The Lab records every message and produces an instrumented report.
The value is that all counterparts exist together, consistently, in one place, with one synthetic population moving through them — so a process that crosses six organizations can be exercised as one process, under the rules that will apply when it is real.
The Sistema de Gestión de Pagos Instantáneos credits the beneficiary within 10 seconds, runs 24/7/365, addresses by alias and notifies both parties immediately. Every financial-intermediation entity, electronic-payment entity, acquirer and sub-acquirer is a mandatory participant. Nobody in the country can integrate against it yet.
Reglamento Art. 60–62; Art. 61 §I; BCRD SGPI page
A would-be electronic-payment entity, wallet provider or payment-initiation provider cannot get a bank’s test environment before it has a bank, and cannot get a bank without a working flow. The ecosystem breaks that loop.
A provider preparing a request for the Central Bank’s no objection needs exactly what an instrumented run produces: a description, an operating scheme, the list of providers, support entities and participants, and evidence for a risk-materiality analysis.
Reglamento Art. 83
Article 83 sets a no-objection regime: an authorized provider that wants to test a new product, service, channel or functionality with other providers or external users must ask the Banco Central for its no objection, filing a description, an implementation plan, the list of providers, support entities and participants, and a risk-materiality analysis. The Virtual Financial Ecosystem involves no real providers and no real external users, so it does not fall under that regime — and a run here is never a substitute for the Central Bank’s no objection. Where a team’s next step is an Art. 83 request, our report is evidence for it. Nothing more. The Banco Central decides.
The Central Bank’s own diagram, Elementos de un sistema de pago, has five elements. The ecosystem maps one architectural layer to each of them — which is why a team’s integration lands on the real taxonomy rather than on ours.
Instruments and their rules are Título VIII of the Reglamento: electronic funds transfers, payment cards and electronic payment accounts (Art. 78); the electronic payment account itself (Art. 19–25), whose balance equals the nominal value received, bears no interest and is refundable on demand; and the obligation on every provider to present and read a QR code carrying the data to initiate a payment order, to a standard the Central Bank sets by instructivo (Art. 78 §IV).
The Sistema de Pago y Liquidación de Valores de la República Dominicana is a public service owned exclusively by the Central Bank, to which all financial-intermediation entities and other authorized entities are attached. The ecosystem simulates its systems one by one — and the instant-payments system the Reglamento adds on top of them.
The SIPARD is owned exclusively by the Central Bank (Ley 183-02, Art. 27; Reglamento Art. 62) and is made up of the real-time gross settlement system, the cheque clearing system, the securities settlement system, the direct debit and direct credit systems, the payment system for CardNET ATM transactions, the mobile payments system, the Visa and Mastercard card-processing systems, and the payment system for subagentes bancarios transactions (BCRD SIPARD page). On top of them the Reglamento adds the Sistema de Gestión de Pagos Instantáneos, administered by the Central Bank (Art. 60), whose management is exclusive to it and not delegable (Art. 62).
The taxonomy is the Reglamento’s, so a team’s integration maps one-to-one onto the real roles. Every simulator carries a Lab name and a visible notice: Banco Norte, EPE del Lab, Adquirente del Lab. None of them ever presents itself as the entity it is modelled after.
Administrator of the LBTR, the SCC and the SGPI; keeper of current accounts; vigilancia; recipient of notifications and registrations; issuer of the account standard.
Banking, insurance and securities supervisors, and a simulated financial-intelligence unit for suspicious- and cash-transaction reports.
Financial-intermediation entities with core accounts, cards, loans, cheques and electronic payment accounts, direct participation in the LBTR, and hosting for the machines on the floor. Each with a personality: strict legacy, permissive digital, cooperative, savings-and-loan.
Electronic payment accounts, a network of agents, remittance and social-subsidy inflows, and the RD$79,000 funding and balance cap.
Merchant affiliation, POS and e-commerce authorization, clearing, settlement, chargebacks, and the cross-border acquiring rules.
Authorization, clearing, settlement, tokenization, 3-D Secure outcomes and EMV.
The switch between the machines on the Lab floor and the simulated banks — cardholder and cardless flows alike.
Batch and file-based transfers with a business-day calendar, returns and reason codes.
The three provider categories the Reglamento newly recognizes, each with its own registration and its own limits.
Cash-in, cash-out, enrolment at the counter and card delivery, at pharmacies, hotels, telco service centres, supermarkets and colmados.
Remittance-and-exchange agents, exchange agents, and the regional counterpart for USD transfers.
Quote, bind, premium by direct debit or card, claim, payout — plus embedded insurance on a loan or a transfer.
Cheque (digitization, truncation, image), transfers (direct debit, direct credit, instant), cards (debit, credit, prepaid), electronic payment account, QR.
Protocol adapters — ISO 8583, ISO 20022, REST/OpenAPI, file exchange, webhooks — with message signing, time-stamps and a log of every message.
Civil-registry lookups, document and liveness verification, and a certification entity for digital signatures and time-stamps.
Credit bureaus, taxpayer lookup and e-invoice acknowledgements, payroll, top-ups and phone-number signals — plus cheque printers and scanner vendors as critical suppliers.
People and businesses with a coherent identity across registry, bureaus, banks, the electronic-payment entity and the telco; merchants; and, from Phase 3, adversaries. Generated per run; no real personal data anywhere.
Every institutional role is also an AI persona — the compliance officer at Banco Norte, the analyst at the simulated financial-intelligence unit, the operator at the simulated Central Bank — so a human-in-the-loop step can be played by an agent or by a visitor standing on the Lab floor.
Timing is not decoration. In the control plane each deadline, window and cap is an executable rule that cites its article, and a rule that fails becomes a finding in the report. When the Junta Monetaria adjusts a value, it changes in one place.
Time itself is a parameter of the run: wall-clock, accelerated — a month of instalments in an hour — or stepped, so a team can stand on the end-of-day cut-off, the weekday pause or the closing of the SIPA window and watch what its application does.
Each process is a scenario: ordered messages across actors, expected states at every step, the variants that must be handled, and the rule it enforces.
Identity, bureau, risk scoring, account or electronic payment account creation, card or credential issuance, additional credentials with their own limits on one balance, first funding at a bank, an agent or a machine. Variants: document mismatch, PEP hit, minor, non-resident, thin file, cap reached.
Art. 19 · Art. 19 §V · cap RD$79,000
Internal; direct credit and direct debit through the simulated administrator, with returns; Pagos al Instante with the 8-minute credit and the 7:00–23:00 window; SGPI with the 10-second credit, alias resolution and 24/7/365; high-value through the LBTR. Variants: insufficient funds, queued then revoked, window closed, duplicate — and a beneficiary charged, which must fail.
Art. 57 · Art. 61 §I · Art. 66 · Art. 81
POS authorization, e-commerce with 3-D Secure, ATM withdrawal on the Lab floor through the simulated network administrator, clearing and settlement of net results in the LBTR, the chargeback lifecycle, a tokenized card in a wallet, the prepaid cap.
Art. 79 · Art. 78 §II
Cardless withdrawal started on the phone and finished on the machine, deposit with recognition, remittance payout, an electronic payment account opened at the machine, a QR payment presented by the machine.
Art. 20 · Art. 78 §IV
A wallet or initiation provider builds an order from a merchant’s QR, obtains verifiable consent and initiates against the user’s bank without ever holding the funds.
Art. 4 mm · Art. 38–40
Cash-in and cash-out at an agente de pago electrónico or a subagente bancario, enrolment at the counter, card delivery.
Art. 26 · Art. 27
Issuance to the standard, digitization and truncation, image exchange in the simulated cheque clearing system, net settlement, return.
Título IX
Pre-approval from bureau data plus behaviour, disbursement, instalments collected by direct debit, delinquency, restructuring.
direct debit · Art. 78
Quote from a bank channel or a machine, bind and premium by direct debit or card, claim with document upload, payout; embedded insurance on a loan or a transfer.
instrument engines
An inbound remittance credited to an electronic payment account in Dominican pesos at the origin rate and reported as a foreign-exchange purchase; a SIPA transfer in US dollars inside the weekday window.
Art. 20 §I · SIPA
Sanctions and PEP screening, transaction monitoring, case management, suspicious- and cash-transaction reports to the simulated financial-intelligence unit, regulatory reports to the simulated supervisor, and the 10-year record with rejected transactions and adjustments and full user access. CEMI Cumplimiento plugs in here as a live participant.
Art. 41–44 · Ley 155-17
Payroll, supplier payments, e-invoicing acknowledgements, tax withholdings, merchant settlement.
direct credit · settlement
An administrator goes down mid-cycle, the LBTR queue stalls, a message is corrupted, a reconciliation breaks. The application must degrade well. This is the chaos mode.
chaos mode
Account takeover, mule networks, synthetic identity, card testing, social engineering at the machine. The synthetic population includes adversaries and the run scores detection.
adversarial mode
The run’s outputs assembled into the shape of a no-objection request: description, operating scheme, participants and support entities, risk-materiality evidence. The Lab grants nothing; it produces the evidence.
Art. 83
The stack is not an engineering convenience: it is the Central Bank’s diagram, made executable. A message enters through the communication-network layer, moves through stateful actors and instrument engines, settles at the simulated Central Bank, draws on support entities, and is judged the whole way down by the control plane where the Reglamento lives.
ISO 8583 for cards, ISO 20022 for transfers and reporting, file conventions for direct debit and credit, the regional standardized account number adopted in 2010, the Central Bank’s QR standard once its instructivo is published, OpenAPI for everything modern. Institution names, BINs, routing identifiers and certificates are the Lab’s own.
The 10 seconds, the 4 minutes, the 8 minutes, the windows, the RD$79,000 cap, no charge to the beneficiary, irrevocability once settled, mandatory SGPI participation, the 10-year record: each is a rule in the control plane, cited by article and dated.
A direct credit debits one simulated bank’s Central-Bank account and credits another’s in the simulated LBTR; a chargeback reverses a settled amount; a suspicious-transaction report changes a customer’s risk state.
Every run is reproducible from its seed. Chaos and adversarial modes are switched on per run and recorded in the report.
Generated per run and coherent across registry, bureaus, banks, the electronic-payment entity and the telco. No real personal data anywhere; the generator is auditable.
A trace, per-actor ledgers, cross-actor reconciliation, and the findings report the Lab already delivers.
Stub, then stateful, then behavioural — latency, load, personality, adversaries — so a counterpart can be cheap where it does not matter and exact where it does.
So the hardware on the Lab floor can join a run instead of watching one.
A run is the unit of work, and the report is the deliverable. It says what was tested — scenarios, seed, fidelity tiers, modes, rule-catalogue version — because a pass is a pass on that run.
The default. Everything reproducible from the seed, so a supervisor’s team or a bank’s vendor can replay exactly what you ran.
An administrator goes down mid-cycle, the LBTR queue stalls, a message is corrupted, a reconciliation breaks. The question is not whether your application survives, but how it degrades.
The synthetic population includes account takeover, mule networks, synthetic identity, card testing and social engineering at the machine. The run scores detection.
The simulation is live in its own cloud project. What a team gets today, what is not live yet, and how to start.
Live now · console, REST API, one isolated world per team.
/openapi.json — the REST API publishes its contract.GET /v1/health/v1/**/v1/atm/** — for real ATM and ITM integrations.x-lab-api-key.GET /v1/health.x-lab-api-key on every call, pick a seed, run a scenario, and read the report.Everything in the ecosystem is simulated and carries a Lab name. It is not an «ambiente de prueba» under Art. 83, and a report serves as evidence only — it grants nothing.
Today this is a simulation, not a digital twin in the strict sense: there is not yet a finished system to be a twin of, since the instant-payments system is being built now. Our aim is to become the true digital twin of the Dominican financial ecosystem as it takes shape, following the work and guidelines of the Central Bank, the Superintendencia and the industry.
The manual is public and generated from the deployed contract and rule catalogue. Questions: partners@cemi.ai.
Phase 0 and Phase 1 run in parallel, starting now. Phase 1 is sized so the first cohort and the first Championship run on it.
Actor catalogue keyed to the Reglamento’s roles; message contracts; scenario format; a rule catalogue with article citations; the synthetic-population model; naming and disclaimers; and a full reading of the three instructivos — administrators and acquirers, electronic-payment entities and electronic payment accounts, and the LBTR — for their operational parameters.
Gateway, bus and control plane with rules, scenarios and traces; the simulated Central Bank with current accounts and LBTR; an SGPI stub with the 10-second service level and alias addressing; two banks; one electronic-payment entity; the direct-debit / direct-credit administrator; the ATM host wired to the machines on the floor; identity; one credit bureau.
onboarding · transfers · cardless withdrawal
Acquirer and sub-acquirer, two card processors, wallet, initiation and gateway providers, agents, the signature and time-stamp entity, the simulated supervisors and financial-intelligence unit, CEMI Cumplimiento as a live participant, a stateful SGPI, net settlement in the LBTR, chaos mode and the first report generator.
cards · QR · agents · compliance · incident
Cheque clearing, insurers and brokers, remittance and exchange agents, the SIPA counterpart, telcos, tax and social security, a second bureau, an adversarial population, time acceleration, certification runs and dossier output.
cheques · credit · insurance · remittances · fraud
A public catalogue and documentation, self-service keys for open programmes and the Championship, sponsored nodes, regulator and academic access, and alignment with each new Central Bank instructivo — the QR standard, the SGPI operating rules — as it is published.
all, plus community scenarios
Ready for 2027, today.
A fintech, insurtech or regtech that cannot get a test environment because it has no bank, and cannot get a bank because it has no working flow. Free for open programmes, interns and the Championship.
Certification runs against the simulated SGPI, ahead of a system in which they will be mandatory participants — and a private lane where their own vendors and startups arrive already certified.
Authorization, clearing, settlement and chargeback cycles exercised against card processors and banks at once, instead of one integration at a time.
Quote, bind, premium and claim wired to real payment rails — and embedded insurance tested where it actually sits, on a loan or a transfer.
The Banco Central and the Superintendencia de Bancos are invited into Phase 0 — their instructivos, their reading of the rules, their scenarios. The vigilancia function is the natural interlocutor.
Reproducible runs, published message contracts and rule catalogues, and synthetic data with nothing personal in it to protect.
An institution sponsors its kind of node: a bank sponsors a simulated bank with its own formats and rules, an acquirer the acquiring node, an insurer the insurance node — and gets a private lane for its vendors and startups.
Priced per run or per scenario pack, for startups and vendors. A bank can ask its vendors to arrive certified.
A provider preparing a no-objection request commissions an instrumented run whose report is shaped as the evidence the request needs. We prepare evidence; the Banco Central decides.
Cohorts and training on the scenarios through the Learning Innovation Lab, a financial track in the AI Learning Challenge, and custom actors, rule packs and scenarios built by CEMI Factory.
Everything on this page comes from the Central Bank’s own published material. Where a figure appears, its article or its page is named.
Also read: Ley 183-02 (Monetary and Financial Law), Art. 27; Ley 155-17 on money laundering and terrorist financing; the Novena Resolución of 18 November 2010 adopting the regional standardized account number; and the tables of contents of the three instructivos — administrators of payment systems and acquirers, electronic-payment entities and electronic payment accounts, and the LBTR — whose full reading is Phase 0 work.
Regulators, banks, electronic-payment entities, acquirers, insurers, startups and universities: Phase 0 is open, and the first nodes are being assigned now. Write to us.