Optimizing UX for Mifos X – Deanna “Takes 3” to Join our Community

Deanna_smallOne of the hallmarks of the current Mifos product is its simple and familiar browser-based user interface. As we launch our new Mifos X platform, we want to retain the essence of this user-friendly UI while injecting a modern refresh into the design of the platform.  As a platform, we aim to have one consistent user experience with products and applications that are as usable and accessible to our global community as Mifos has been.

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First Mifos X Customers Going Live! – Taking Elevate Africa to New Heights

2013 will be the year we transition the community over to the new Mifos X platform. We chose to start simple with individual lending support as the scope of our first application built top of the platform. Already this individual lending app is being used by several MFIs in production. Over the coming weeks we’re going to highlight some of our first beta-testers who have been using Mifos X. In this post, we’ll take a look at Elevate Africa, led by Henrik Esbensen – empowering entrepreneurs of West Africa through an in-depth individual lending model. Henrik ran into some challenges in using the current versions of Mifos so he was eager to be a pilot Mifos X user to take advantage of the flexibility it would enable.

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Our Development Philosophy

John and Keith Woodlock have followed a requirements-driven development philosophy as they’ve built out the core for Mifos X. They along with several Specialists in the community including Conflux Technologies, Hugo Technologies, and SolDevelo have been working closely with select MFIs to build out applications that will support the various methodologies of bringing financial services to the poor. All development has been based directly on user requirements that we have been rapidly testing and iterating on with these pilot users. We are now rolling out functionalities to fully support group lending methodologies with a target of having Mifos X reach feature parity with Mifos 2.6 by mid-2013.

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Mifos 2.6 (Esha K) is Live

As we close out 2012 and bring in 2013, we are excited to roll out the final major release on top of the Mifos 2.x codebase.  With its fourth major release, SolDevelo has wrapped up Esha K, our Mifos 2.6 release. The theme of Mifos 2.6 was to fill any major outstanding gaps and make Mifos 2.6 be the most polished and well-rounded application for group lending before we transition development to our lighter, more flexible, next-generation platform Mifos X. Major new functionalities include support for daily loans and savings accounts, the ability to upload and attach files to loans and clients, a user interface for modifying the chart of the accounts, a dashboard of key business metrics on the homepage, and enhancements to importing data in Mifos.

Apart from these many new features, more than 45 bugs were also fixed by the SolDevelo team.  We will also soon be shipping as separate releases enhancements to accounting and reporting – Hugo Technologies has completed a range of enhancements to the Mifos-ACC accounting module and Conflux Technologies will be delivering a few additional standard reports to our Business Intelligence Suite. Please join us in thanking Lukasz C, Natalia, Kasia, Kamil, Wojciech, Pawel, Grzegorz, Marcin, Jakub P, Jakub W, Lukasz W and the rest of the SolDevelo team who led the development of these new features and helped to review incoming contributions.

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Recapping Random Hacks of Kindness

Two days. Three continents. Twenty volunteers. One mission – 3 Billion Maries.

rhok_logo_CS4-300x95Earlier this month, volunteers from HP and the broader geekspace  came together to “hack for humanity” as part of the global Random Hacks of Kindness. With support from Social Coding 4 Good we united in various worldwide locations to take on three different challenges we had presented to strengthen the Mifos X platform.  In Bangalore, Dublin, San Francisco, and via a remote bonus team in Chennai, we set out  to build solutions to our three problem definitions along with volunteers from  HP Social Innovation – 1) Mobile App for Mifos X, 2) Integration of SMS communications, and 3) Creation of a WYSIWYG document generator. Across all three sites our volunteers gravitated towards working on the mobile app for Mifos X, tackling it from all different angles of smartphone solutions including native apps for Android and iOS as well as cross-platform apps via Titanium and PhoneGap. We made some solid progress on the actual apps that is nicely summarized on our HackPad which tracked the weekend’s activity. We now have a working iPhone app that supports logging in, retrieving a list of clients and displaying a summary of their loan accounts (watch the demo!). On top of that we have a native Android app that supports on and offline authentication and syncing down office data.  All these apps serve as great starting points as full-fledged mobile applications on top of Mifos X.

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Hacking for a Cause – Mifos at Random Hacks of Kindness

I am totally psyched to be headed to San Francisco this weekend to experience Random Hacks of Kindness for the first time. We are ready to RHoK out with Mifos as one of the featured problems for December 2012.  The sheer enormity of this global collaboration puts me in awe – i really don’t know what to expect but am excited to lead our project and am sure great things are on the way.

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We have been wanting to do RHoK for a while now and luckily all things have quickly come together thanks to Celine Takatsuno from Benetech and Social Coding 4 Good. We are privileged and grateful to be partnering with Social Coding 4 Good who have given us this opportunity to be a featured problem and work with HP Social Innovation teams across three global locations.

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Excitement is in the Air – 2012 Mifos Summit Recap

This past month, we concluded our first-ever global gathering of the Mifos community at our 2012 Mifos Summit in Bangalore, India. It was a huge success with 42 people in attendance from a dozen countries including 11 Specialists,  20 microfinance practitioners, and 11 contributors and strategic partners. I was thrilled to meet community members new and old for the first time and to finally put faces to all the names/voices behind the Skype calls. I was proud to see all the interactions and camaraderie that was shared throughout the grounds of the venue in Bangalore.

First off we want to graciously thank Paul Maritz for proposing and funding the summit; without him none of it would have been possible. A big thank you as well to Cat Allman and Google’s Open Source Programs office who pitched in last minute support to allow us to offer travel scholarships to several more individuals flying in from Africa. Please also extend your gratitude to Suresh, Arun, Praveen, and Rao from Grameen Koota for hosting the summit and conducting site visits along with Nirantara. Finally, a huge thank you to Vishwas, Nayan, and Ashok from Conflux Technologies who went out of their way to ensure smooth logistics and coordinate activities on the ground in Bangalore.

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Specialist Spotlight – SolDevelo

We like to focus in on our Specialists every once a while, recognizing their contributions and providing a more personal glimpse into their organization and team. This time around we’re taking a closer look at SolDevelo. SolDevelo has been playing a crucial role as the technical stewards of the Mifos 2.0 codebase. Head over to the COSM blog to read about each member of the team and what their plans are for Mifos in 2013 including continued expansion of their hosted service, MifCloud.

Specialist Spotlight – Sol Develo

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This regular blog series will shine the light on some of our top Specialists. Not only do we want to recognize them for their accomplishments, we want others to learn from the approach they’ve taken to promote and implement Mifos.

Mifos Specialists are one of the most crucial links in our community – they are the driving force that is promoting and supporting Mifos worldwide.  Aside from championing our product and bringing the Mifos technology to new markets, they act as the fundamental bridge feeding in MFI requirements to be developed by the community. Specialists don’t stop there as many are also developing and localizing the product to fit their local market.  For all these reasons, COSM is focusing it energy on making these Specialists successful – they are the primary channel to market, the eyes and ears on the ground, and the entrepreneurial force that will help us sustainably scale.

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Remixing Microfinance with the Client at the Center

From the onset, a fundamental part of our product vision for Mifos X has been to be a flexible platform agnostic of any one microfinance methodology. During the Mifos Summit (more takeaways to come in a future post), a key finding that emerged was the centrality of the relationship with the client in both the data model and the platform architecture.  Regardless of whatever methodology supported, relationships can be defined between the client and whatever account, entity, or structure you would like.

Gripped by a comment made by Rupal Patel on the importance of client data during our Setting the Mifos X vision, Craig came up with a quick sketch that is a good first pass at our vision for Mifos X.  Client Data is at the center and the various flows of money or information that are coming in and out of the platform are clearly visualized.

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Remixing Microfinance – Reflecting on our Vision

This past week there was a virtual conference led by CGAP and Microsave on Client Insights as well as blog post from Ignacio Mas on remixing microfinance. Both these topics on focusin on client data and looking at way to create hybrid models of delivering financial services were a good follow-on to our vision session at the Mifos Summit.  It got me reflecting on our product vision that was beginning to emerge at the summit. Technology often constrains what an MFI should do rather than enable it. We aim to make Mifos X a flexible platform that puts no limits on how an MFI can design and deliver their financial services.

To learn more about product vision, read the full blog post.