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Vanuatu is pioneering Unblocked Cash, a mobile-based development project using blockchain technology, along with tap-and-pay cards, to provide direct assistance to families recovering from disasters or acute financial distress. The cards can be 'loaded' with money, to act like a debit card, allowing families to directly buy food, medicine, clothes, and other emergency supplies, even hardware to rebuild destroyed homes. Traditionally, it typically costs between $2 - $3 to deploy $1 worth of aid post-disaster. The digital model reduces aid distribution costs by up to 75%, and reduces sign-on time from over an hour with older approaches to only three minutes.

The Reserve Bank of Vanuatu launched a new national digital payment platform, VANKLIA, to strengthen its digital economy and promote financial inclusion. The VANKLIA system has two main components: a Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) component which carries out high value and high priority payments and settlement in real time; and an Automated Clearing House (ACH) component which facilitates the clearing of low value, high volume electronic fund transfers for batch payments such as salary payments and instant fund transfers for retail payments.

On January 10, 2022 Soramitsu was selected by the NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting to evaluate the potential risks and benefits of introducing CBDC in Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu. Confirmed by the IMF in September 2022: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fintech-notes/Issues/2022/09/27/Towards-Central-Bank-Digital-Currencies-in-Asia-and-the-Pacific-Results-of-a-Regional-Survey-523914