Edward Cable

Top 10 Mifos Moments of 2018

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As 2018 comes to a close, it’s time to look back on the year that was. The growth of our ecosystem, both in scale of outreach and breadth of services and solutions continues to impress us – more than 10,000,000 individuals are now being reached by solutions powered by Mifos and Fineract! We finally began to tell that story on a grander stage, getting the word out at multiple conferences and getting recognized for different awards. While we didn’t ship many official releases, we’re ready to release the newest versions of our mobile wallet and mobile banking apps, the next release of Mifos X and are ready to jumpstart the community around Fineract CN.

As we heads toward 2019, we look to our vibrant ecosystem to help us take the Mifos Initiative to new heights – we’ll be working directly with partners to catalyze new solutions, we’ll be launching an association-based funding model to directly enable partners and users to help with ongoing sustainability, and we’ll begin executing upon our roadmap for Fineract CN, unlocking our vision of Financial Inclusion 2.0.

Here’s our list of the top 10 moments from 2018 in more or less chronological order.

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rbrown

Star Contributor of the Month – Chirag Gupta

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This month we are extremely excited to recognize Chirag Gupta as our star contributor for the month, and last of 2018! Chirag is our youngest Star Contributor to date! After working with Mifos through Google-Code-In as a student in 2016, Chirag has continued to contribute ever since! This year he served as a Google-Code-In Mentor, where he has mad a tremendous impact helping guide students in the same way he was during GCI only a few short years ago. In addition to being a GCI Mentor, Chirag has helped Mifos in numerous ways, including fixing bugs in our mobile pay app and web projects. We couldn’t have done Google Code-In this year without Chirag – he was there to welcome and help nearly every student. Keep up the great work, Chirag! We love having you as a part of our Mifos family! Read more

Edward Cable

Mifos selected as Runner-Up for Fintech for Good Award in 2018 Banking Technology Awards

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The Mifos Initiative is honored to have been chosen as the Highly Commended runner-up entrant for the Fintech for Good Award in the 2018 Banking Technology Awards led by Fintech Futures.

While Deutsche Bank took home the Fintech for Good Award for its CommunITy Hackathons, we are pleased to have the prestigious honor of being selected as the Highly Commended entry amongst finalists like , , , , , and Banco BNI Europa.

Thank you to Fintech Futures and Comms for Good for hosting the awards and this valuable recognition. We’re proud that the impact of our community and ecosystem got to be recognize on this grand fintech stage and look forward to this as a springboard to further strengthen Mifos/Fineract as a recognizble name for open source banking, digital financial services innovation, cloud-based core banking, and banking the underbanked.

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rbrown

Ways to Give

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As a non-profit organization, donations are key to our success. Whether it be time or money, the generosity of the Mifos community is what allows our initiative to be so successful and steadily work towards a world where everyone has access to basic financial services. Read about the different way you can contribute to Mifos this holiday season!

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Edward Cable

Mifos Keynotes Linux Foundation Open Source Summit Europe

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Mifos President/CEO, Edward Cable, had the honor and privilege of giving a keynote talk at the Open Source Summit Europe hosted by Linux Foundation in Edinburgh, Scotland. His talk titled, Open Source Banking: End Poverty One Line of Code at a Time, can be watched below.

The aim of our keynote was to show developers that they could directly use open source to advance a social good like ending poverty. Apart from motiving developers with our powerful social mission of 3 Billion Maries, we were able to use this massive forum to tell our story around Open Source Banking and the evolution of our community, ecosystem and technology stack culminating in Fineract CN and Financial Inclusion 2.0.  Showing our pioneering efforts in guiding the sector through its evolution from microfinance to digital financial services fit nicely into the conference’s theme of The Evolution of Open.

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rbrown

My Google Code In Experience – Chirag Gupta

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With the start of Google Code In this Tuesday, we wanted to share the experience of Chirag Gupta, one of our Mifos community members and GCI participants who went on the trip to Google headquarters in San Francisco after being selected as one of the winners of last year’s Google Code In. Read his incredible story below:

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rbrown

2018 Google Summer of Code Reflections

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Hopefully you read our introduction to our 2018 Google Summer of Code interns. If you missed our official recap, take a look to discover what they worked on.  As is tradition, we always ask our our interns a few questions at the end of the summer to reflect back on their experiences and see how they’ve transformed over the summer. Here is what they had to say!

What was your most rewarding experience contributing to Mifos this summer?

Lalit – Learning about the architecture that has been working for smaller financial institutions without fancier servers and tooling. Understanding the importance of scorecards and analytics for banking and coming up with an approach that would help financial institutions to adopt analytics for better risk management.

Ruphine –  Most rewarding experience for me was the software engineering experience I gain by working on cloud native application. It has greatly improve my engineering skills. I also acquire some experience by working in a team and contributing to the community.

Pembe – The fact that I get to work with others and to be able to give account of my daily progress. Also to have mentors who are willing to help me explain the big picture and also to have domain experts which has helped improve my knowledge in terms of financing, working with microservices and improving my coding practices.

Abhay – Interacting with the community members and my mentors was the most rewarding experience for me this summer. I got an opportunity to not only work on the new revamped version of web-app improving my knowledge but also be a part of the decision making process and learn from everyone. I am really thankful to my mentors who always believed in me.

Ankit Interacting with the community members and my mentors was the most rewarding experience for me this summer. I got an opportunity to not only work on the new revamped version of web-app improving my knowledge but also be a part of the decision making process and learn from everyone. I am really thankful to my mentors who always believed in me.

Sanyam: The most rewarding experience for me was interacting with the Mifos Community and my mentors (Steve, Rahul, and Ed ) and also got the hands-on experience on a Fintech backend application and solving problems together and learned a lot in the whole process.

Courage – The most rewarding experience for me was actually working on the whole project. For a while now I have been so excited about cloud computing and with this project, I was opportune to not only work on a cloud-native project but also containerize the project for a production-ready environment and this has helped improve on my skills.

Dingfan – My most rewarding experience was learning about different aspect knowledge including technical and non-technical aspect. In the technical aspect, I learnt a lot about the architecture of Java programming. For example, I knew more about the steps to construct a project under the Spring framework pattern. In non-technical aspect, I learnt how to discuss with other people including peers and seniors.

Ebenezer – The most rewarding experience is the opportunity to build a new microservice from the ground up and to do so in an open source community. I am an open source enthusiast who believes in the potential of open source to help Africa leapfrog into technological advancement and prosperity. And so, I deem this a priceless experience;  to spearhead the development of this project within this conditions. Now, what made it even better is the sense of belonging to such an amazing open source community, and this is a dream come true.

Aksh – Most rewarding experience for me was to learn about the different architectures and how using a good architecture design can be really helpful in the long term for the project. My all personal projects before the summer were built to ‘just’ work, but now I can’t imagine writing a project without at least the MVP architecture.

Saksham – I got to interact with Rajan, Ed, other interns, and other community members, each interaction rewarded me in learning something new.

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Edward Cable

Mifos Conference Rundown

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One of our goals in 2018 was to be more active at conferences in getting the word out about the Mifos Initiative and the great work our community and ecosystem has been doing. To that end, we’ve had an active presence at a number of conferences this summer and a couple on their way this fall.

ApacheCon North America 2018

Next week I’ll be traveling to Montreal to give a talk at ApacheCon. Check out my separate post on ApacheCon to learn more about the Fineract Fintech track taking place on Tuesday.

Linux Foundation Open Source Summit Europe

In October, I’m going to cross over the pond to Edinburgh, UK to give a keynote at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe. My talk will highlight the massive need to bring financial services to the more than 3 Billion underbanked worldwide and how we can only do that through the game-changing OPEN approach we’ve pioneered that unites open source technology, supported by open community and sustained by open business models.

This will be an awesome chance to promote our initiative and community to the broader tech community in Europe. Thanks to Dave Neary for the introduction and to Angela Brown and Jillian Hall for making this happen.

 

OSCON

We returned to OSCON once again for the 8th time and as is tradition we hosted a booth in the Non Profit Pavilion under the sponsorship of O’Reilly. 

Our booth really helped us capture and experience how big of a fintech presence there was at the conference; as compared to years past, the financial services sector has really been starting to embrace open source.  We were able to tell the story of our ecosystem and the innovation its enabled on top of our open API to representatives of companies including Square, Paypal, American Express, MasterCard, Capital One, Royal Bank of Canada, Farm Credit, Decred, Thomson Reuters, IBM, HyperLedger, Sovrin Foundation, and more. Read more

Edward Cable

Fineract Fintech Track at ApacheCon North America 2018

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Next week ApacheCon descends upon Montreal – we’ll have a large contingent of our community in  attendance and Fineract will take center stage with PMC VP, Myrle Krantz, giving a keynote entitled Banking on Open Source.

I’ll be giving a similar version of the talk James Dailey and I delivered at OSCON, Open Banking: Fueling Innovation on an Open Source Core Banking Platform. In this talk, I’ll show firsthand what Open Source Banking truly is by presenting four enterprise case studies on Fineract adoption, implementation, and contribution at financial institutions ranging from fintechs to microfinance banks.

This is my first ApacheCon and I’m looking forward to it – for the chance to put faces to names for the many ASF members I’ve interacted with on the lists and to attend sessions to further immerse myself in the Apache Way.  

For any of the Mifos or Fineract community in North America, I’d highly recommend you try to make it the conference because Tuesday, Sept 25, will house the Fineract Fintech track. Thank you to Rich Bowen for making this dedicated track happen.

Myrle Krantz, Apache Fineract VP will kick things off with a keynote that morning entitled “Banking on Open Source”. Next up will be Rajan Maurya sharing his experiences as an intern on Branchless Banking and Promoting Financial Inclusion in the Fragile States.  My talk on Open Source Banking will then follow and later in the day, Gaurav Saini will speaking about building an Offline-First Expense Manager App with Apache CouchDB.  Daniel Ruggeri of Mastercard will be giving his talk, Bringing Enterprise into the Open Source World  that fits nicely into the theme as it chronicles Mastercard’s Open Source contribution journey.

A big thank you also to the Apache Travel Assistance Committee whose generous travel sponsorship is enabling Rajan Maurya, Kumaranath Fernando, and Sanyam Goel to travel all the way from India to attend.