About Microfinance Institutions (MFI's)
Wikipedia has some good, short summaries on microfinance, microcredit, and the organizations involved. The MFI market itself is getting very competitive in India and is growing around the world.  Nonetheless, MFI's do not have large budgets, so Mifos aims to keep down he equipment and maintenance costs for the core business processes.

Branches
An MFI branch may differ from what you may think of as a bank branch. They are simple offices where loan officers can do paperwork and data entry.  Clients of the MFI only occasionally visit a branch.  Disbursements of funds may occur at a branch or at or near a local commercial bank.   The branches can be in Bangalore near slums or 100 km outside the city. Grameen Koota in Bangalore currently has 44 branches serving 120,000 active clients and will grow rapidly in the coming year. In other countries, branch offices are hundreds of kilometers from the head office, and centers can be even farther afield.

Branch Facilities
A branch has one PC for data entry and a few tables at which loan officers process cash reconciliation. Branches do not have air conditioning, and the power supply is on a backup generator or UPS  because power outages are frequent. The internet connection may go as high as 512 KBPS, but generally bandwidth is going to be much lower, and outages necessitate the use of dial-up connections. Some branches consistently operate at ~56 KBPS.  On these connections, data entry may take several hours.

Loan officers interact with their clients at center meetings. The meetings take place somewhere (indoors or outdoors) close to where clients live. LO's typically travel by motorcycles to get to all locations.  Each day, the loan officers print out a Collection Sheet before leaving the branch.  This sheet is used to track attendance, payments, and fees at the center meetings.  Later in the day, it will be the source for data entry

At GK, LO's go out into the field in the morning to hold center meetings and collect payments from the (usually female) clients. They have 20 clients per center and meet with six or seven centers every day, Monday through Saturday. After the meetings are complete, the LO's work at the branch reconciling cash and accounts. When that portion is complete, one loan officer starts data entry into Mifos. Later in the day, clients may come in to receive an special disbursement.

After all disbursements and paper work are complete, data entry finishes and the officers run reports.  Batch jobs occur at night to perform additional processing.   In the evenings--the times when the poor are not working--the LO's will work on recruiting and training clients.   New clients will be added to Mifos the next business day.