Take a look at back at some highlights from 2020 as we positioned Mifos and Fineract as foundational digital public goods, providing open building blocks to help rapidly mobilize accounts and payments amidst the response to COVID-19.
The Mifos and Fineract communities are honored to have Mifos and Fineract be nominated and selected as Digital Public Goods by the UN-supported Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA). Additionally, both Mifos and Fineract along with OpenG2P, Mojaloop, and MOSIP were selected as part of the 7 key projects by the DPG Alliance’s Financial Inclusion Community of Practice (CoP) to help advance the Secretary General’s digital cooperation roadmap to achieve greater financial inclusion and meet the sustainable development goals by 2030.
The DPGA convenes expert Communities of Practice (CoPs) to support the discovery, assessment and advancement of digital public goods with high potential for addressing critical development needs in low- and middle-income countries. The Financial Inclusion CoP spent the last few months identifying and shortlisting technologies that, in a given country, can be used by a range of service providers and innovators. These technologies can be built on across sectors and have features that can allow countries to freely adopt and iterate them to meet local needs.
The DPGA along with a growing international consensus has recognized digitization of public financing as a key driver of financial inclusion at scale with government payments estimated at $220-$320 billion annually by the IMF. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened this need to equip governments with the ability to rapidly provide accounts and disburse payments to weather the economic impact of the health crisis.
Mifos and Fineract have long aimed to provide a common set of open source building blocks for composable financial services and are happy to see the sector recognize the need to reduce duplicative efforts and formally identify and make discoverable a set of Digital Public Goods and enable collaboration and innovation around them.This critical recognition and endorsement of Mifos and Fineract as these foundational digital public goods will help us in advocating for the adoption and deployment of Mifos for G2P scenarios as countries across the globe stabilize and rebound from the pandemic.
Cross-posted from the DSTI Blog on November 18, 2020:
The UN-based Digital Public Goods Alliance adds OpenG2P as a digital public good in alignment with the Digital Public Goods Standard. Bootstrapped by a dynamic group of innovators at the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI), Government of Sierra Leone, “OpenG2P” emerged out of the 2014-2016 Sierra Leone Ebola Payments Program, and is developed as a set of open-source building blocks to help Governments worldwide digitize their social protection programs.
In today’s Covid-19 pandemic, accelerating cash transfers is the single most important response to getting assistance in the hands of frontline workers and vulnerable groups in a timely and transparent manner. However, many governments across the world are hampered by limited interoperability within their nascent digital infrastructures such as identity, payment ecosystem, and social protection enrollment systems. OpenG2P creates a framework to digitize cash transfer programs through a set of open source, free to use, digital solutions that build on existing infrastructures to address country-specific gaps.
Dr. David Sengeh, Chief Innovation Officer of DSTI and one of the architects of OpenG2P said; “Mobilizing cash transfers and payment of beneficiaries through digital bank accounts and mobile wallets is not the singular magic potion that solves governments’ Covid-19-related social protection challenges. But it is a critical step to ensuring that the right people get the resources they need in a transparent way. This is why today we are proud to be recognized for our work within government and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”
The ultimate goal of OpenG2P is to provide a seamless solution that helps governments increase the efficacy of their economic relief, maximize choice for their citizens, and improve financial inclusion while protecting their right to data privacy and informed consent.
“These complexities around implementation will be solved by building a collaborative cross-sectoral ecosystem that can continually verify, enroll and pay with improved transparency, accountability, and choice for citizens,” said Mr Salton Massally who is the technical lead and architect of OpenG2P.
OpenG2P is also selected as one of the 7 key projects along with MojaLoop, Mifos, and MOSIP by the Alliance’s Financial Inclusion Community of Practice to help advance the Secretary General’s digital cooperation roadmap to achieve greater financial inclusion and meet the sustainable development goals by 2030. As such, Paul Maritz, a seasoned early stage open source investor, will provide catalytic co-funding for the reference implementation of OpenG2P in Sierra Leone through the Digital Inclusion Foundation.
DSTI collaborated with key partners Mifos, DIAL and iDT Labs on OpenG2P through voluntary non-financial contributions of James Dailey and Ed Cable of Mifos, Salton Massally and Keyzom Ngodup Massally as independent advisors.
Mifos, the global fintech thought leader and pioneer of innovative open source banking technology for consumer financial services, has been recognized as a 2020 Benzinga Global Fintech Listmaker for Best API.
The official Benzinga Fintech Listmakers comprises 250 carefully vetted and renowned companies and executives who are striving to revolutionize the fintech industry. From deeply established companies to the newest startups, this group is impacting sectors like payments, banking, investing, technology and financial literacy.
Mifos originated the concept of Open Source Banking through a core banking platform that is open source from the ground up with a full set of APIs to build from. As the DNA of financial services that can be expressed in many ways, Mifos and Apache Fineract provide a set of open source building blocks that can be composed into financial services of any form. Read more
This month marks nearly five years since The Mifos Initiative began the process of donating the Mifos X software to the Apache Software Foundation leading to the formation of the top-level project, Apache Fineract. We’re proud to see how the community has continued to grow and evolve with the first ever Fineract track taking place at this year’s ApacheCon, which is going completely virtual this year as ApacheCon @Home.
Throughout this time the Mifos Initiative has continued to act as a thought leader for democratizing financial services while stewarding the ecosystem of companies developing solutions and contributing to the upstream development on Apache Fineract. Members of the Mifos team will be leading a number of talks and moderating several panels which will showcase this ecosystem and the roadmap we’re advancing to position Apache Fineract as both a foundational digital public good and disruptive open source core banking platform.
ApacheCon @Home is completely virtual this year and will be held September 29 to October 2 from xyz to xyz. View the Fineract track agenda for details on each session and register for the conference, here: https://hopin.to/events/apachecon-home. During the three day Fineract track, spearheaded by Javier Borkenztain from Fiter, there will be a range of talks and panels highlighting the past, present, and future of Fineract.
James Dailey, the current chairman of the Mifos board and the visionary behind Apache Fineract which originally started out as MOAP, the microbanking architecture project nearly two decades ago, will moderate a panel looking at The Present of Fineract and will give a glimpse into the future by participating in a panel envisioning Fineract in 2030 and leading a talk on Open Source as a Counterweight to PlatFins.
Michael Vorburger, longtime Mifos and Fineract volunteer who recently joined the Mifos Initiative board, will share his efforts in catalyzing upstream development across the community during his Fineract: Reinvigorating Community Talk which has been made possible through the development infrastructure he built out and will showcase during his Running Fineract.dev like a Cloud Native SRE session.
President/CEO of the Mifos Initiative, Edward Cable, will moderate a number of different panels which showcase the expertise of our ecosystem, the breadth of use cases for which they’ve deployed Fineract, and the roadmap of how Mifos will help to guide the ecosystem in evolving Fineract as an end to end open source architecture for composable financial services.
Apache Fineract, as a flexible and scalable account and wallet management platform is the critical foundation for enabling real-time payments adoption, fueling mobile innovation at both a consumer as well as delivery channel level, helping governments digitize large scale cash transfers, and leveraging the power of data science to deliver more impactful financial services.
This past week we kicked off the 2020 Google Summer of Code. This year marks the 16th year for GSOC with Mifos participating for the 7th time independently and 9th year overall. As our stack of open source building blocks for financial services continues to grow, so does our class of interns – this year will be our largest class to date with 17 interns participating in GSOC through the Mifos Initiative along with three GSOC interns under the Apache Software Foundation working on Fineract and one Outreachy Intern for Mifos sponsored by DIAL to work on Apache Fineract.
Working with an intern class of this size across all the projects and repositories between Mifos and Fineract will be a challenge that requires the effective participation of our community in helping to welcome these interns, provide feedback on their work, and to review and merge the contributions they are making. We are eager to incorporate the enhancements they’ll be making to our existing repositories and the new projects they will be starting but most importantly being able to pass the torch onto the next generation of our open source fintech force, who will become the future leaders of our community and fintech innovators blazing new trails. We will have eight interns working on our suite of mobile apps, five interns working on our web apps, four interns working on integration and new plugins/modules, and four interns working directly on Fineract 1.x.
For our mobile apps, the primary focus areas will be integrating our customer-facing apps via Open Banking APIs and an API Gateway, enhancing functionality and user experience, deepening the integration with Payment Hub EE, along with rewriting apps into Kotlin to enable cross-platform development, and even abstracting out common code into an SDK and building a brand new app for third-party fintechs. Shashank Priyadarshi, will be working under the mentorship of Abhilash Gunasegaran and Saransh Sharma on our Android Client 7.0 while Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi will be working with support from Rajan Maurya on Fineract CN Mobile 4.0. Chinmay Kulkarni will also be working on our Android field operations apps by abstracting out common features into an SDK with support from Ishan Khanna. For our customer-facing apps, Shivangi Singh will be working on Mifos Mobile 5.0 under the mentorship of Sashank Mishra and Saksham Handu. Garvit Agarwal will be working on Mifos Mobile CN 3.0 with Abhijit Ramesh as his mentor. Ashwin Ramakrishnan will also be working on our customer-facing apps but converting them to Kotlin. Devansh Aggarwal will be working on our Mobile Wallet 4.0 with Shivansh Tiwari and Naman Dwivedi as his mentors. Ankur Sharma, a returning GSOC intern, will work on building brand new open banking fintech app with Naman, Rajan, and Istvan Molnar as his mentors.
On the web front, we will aim to complete the rewrite of our web-app, build a more polished and streamlined reference UI for Fineract CN, enhance our online banking app, and build a configuration wizard and extend our Operations UI for Payment Hub EE. Two interns, Karan Takalkar and Muskan Khedia, working with Abhay Chawla and Jivjyot Singh, will be focused on completing the remaining 40% of our new web app in Angular and getting all the testing coverage in place to make sure it’s production-ready. Manish Kumar, another returning GSOC intern, will work under Ankit Ohja on our Online Banking App 4.0. Ashutosh Sharma will split his focus on two sub-projects, a self-guided configuration wizard on the new web-app with support from Bharath Gowda, and adding new screens and functionalities to the Operations UI for Payment Hub EE with support from Adam Saghy. Abhijeet Khangarot will be working on a brand new reference UI for Fineract CN focused on digital and challenger banks with support from Pranjal Goswami, Gaurav Saini, and Giorgio Zoppi.
On integrations and additional modules for Fineract, we’ll continue to deepen our payments integration, explore more concepts in machine learning and build out more components for decisioning and origination. Subham Pramanik will be building out the Payment Hub EE connector for the GSMA Mobile Money API under the mentorship of Avik Ganguly and Rahul Goel. Finalizing our credit bureau integration module, will be Rahul Pawar, with mentors, Nikhil Pawar and Manoj VM, to guide him. Mehul Arora, will be completing our Machine Learning Credit Scorecards project under the guidance of Lalit Mohan. Yash Khare will be working with Nayan Ambali as his mentor on completing the Vision PPI project.
We have a stellar class of GSOC interns from ASF and Outreachy working on some critical upgrades, enhancements, and testing improvements to Fineract 1.x to make core platform more stable and and production-ready to be a rock-solid upstream codebase for others to continue to innovate from. Manthan Surkar will be tackling the expansive code refactoring across the platform along with completing Swagger API documentation and addressing issues in our backlog under the mentorship of long-time and returning mentor, Michael Vorburger. Yemdjih Kaze Nasser is surmounting the much-needed migration of our ORM from OpenJPA to Eclipselink with support from Awasum Yannick, Courage Angeh, and Sanyam Goel. Percy Ashu with the guidance of Awasum will be addressing vulnerability found in code scanning along with improving testing coverage of the platform. Natasha Narajan, part of the Outreachy program that we’re participating in with support from DIAL, is being mentored by Michael Vorburger and focusing on completing numerous tasks and issues from our backlog related to strengthening and hardening Fineract 1.x.
Read on for a brief professional intro for each intern and their project and stay tuned for our second round of posts introducing some fun facts about each intern. Feel free to find them on the lists or Gitter and welcome them to the community. Throughout the summer, we’ll have showcases of their work during the community meetings.
As countries around the world begin to emerge out of lockdown and economies attempt to recover, the response to the informal economy will be ever more critical as the underbanked are more severely impacted and technology-enabled financial inclusion will be fundamental in helping soften the impact of COVID-19. We have created a special section on Mifos.org (https://mifos.org/take-action/covid-19/) to highlight how our open building blocks for digital financial servies and global community can help the Base of the Pyramid absorb the severe economic shock of the pandemic through the innovation of inclusive fintech enabling the rapid delivery of G2P benefits, flexible and streamlined operations, and an accelerated transformation towards digital payments and branchless channels.
You can explore these building blocks, our APIs and reference mobile apps, and even sign up for a sandbox in the cloud.
Our COVID-19 response also includes links to resources and knowledgebases compiled by BFA Global, CGAP, and the Center for Financial Inclusion on COVID-19 and Financial Inclusion . We’ll also be adding a section showcasing how partners across our community have been helping their local fintechs and financial institutions swiftly respond to the emerging needs of their customers.
James Dailey, Mifos founder and Chairman of our Board, has been championing how the sector can use our open building blocks for digital financial services to rapidly deploy accounts and enable G2P payments in the cloud. He showcased this in the tech demo below he gave at the 2020 Global Digital Development Forum and detailed out the challenges and opportunities that will be faced in helping the informal economy recover in article he co-authored with Jill Shemin on NextBillion.net.
This summer you’ll have the ability to change lives – three billion of them – one line of code at a time. The Mifos Initiative will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the ninth time. You’ll have the have the chance to build web and mobile apps for digital financial services or contribute to our award-winning Mifos X open source technology platform powered by Apache Fineract or brand new Apache Fineract CN application framework for digital financial services. Google Summer of Code is a global program sponsored by Google that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. Students accepted to the program will spend their summers coding from May 18th to August 17th and upon successful evaluation, receive a stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline – student applications are open from March 16 through March 31! You can apply from our organization page.
Want to learn more? Browse our ideas page for projects and links to all our code repositories.
To help aspiring applicants and answer any questions related to ideas or improving your applications and proposal, we’ll be holding a Mifos Google Summer of Code AMA on Tuesday, March 24.
We are pleased to formally announce the newest member of our board of business and technical advisors, Ali Hussein Kassim. Ali is a true visionary in the fintech world and will use his expertise and critical insight into the sector will help shape the ongoing product and community development strategy and advance our sustainability endeavors. Ali wears many hats across the African fintech landscape and has already been advising us and helping connect Mifos with new opportunities throughout 2019.
Connect with Ali on LinkedIn as he’s certain to spark up a through-provoking and insightful conversation with you.
Join us in welcoming Ali; we look forward to his deeper role in helping the ecosystem grow and establish a stronger foothold for Mifos across the African fintech market.
Here’s a bit more on Ali: Ali is the CEO of FinteXX Technology Ltd, a Pan-African Fintech company that enables the financial ecosystem to utilize digital technologies towards enhancing efficiency, bring innovative financial solutions to the unbanked across the continent and create awareness towards the transformative nature of Financial Technologies. He is also the Principal, AHK & Associates, a Digital Transformation Consultancy focused on enabling clients leverage Digital Technologies to achieve Transformational Change in their organizations. He is also an investor and mentor to startups the Demo Ventures Franchise. Apart from that, he is the immediate former CEO of 3mice interactive media ltd, a Nairobi based pioneer Digital Agency in East Africa and was also the founding CEO of Wunderman (Kenya), a Global Digital top ten Agency, where he successfully implemented the Balanced Scorecard, a management tool for translating strategy into action.
Ali also plays an active role on a number of different boards including:
The Mifos Initiative is honored to have been chosen as the Highly Commended runner-up entrant for the Best Financial Inclusion or Outreach Initiative at the 2019 Financial Innovation Awards hosted by The London Institute of Banking and Finance this past month in London.
Congratulations to the NS&I Government Payment Services on winning the award for its Help to Save initiative; we are are honored to be in such esteemed company of impactful and innovative solutions including PAYG solutions from Azuri, banking solutions for the visually impaired from Lloyds Bank, and the Principality Building Society’s financial education initiative. Thank you to the London Institute of Banking and Finance for this valuable recognition.
Alex Fraser, CEO at The London Institute of Banking & Finance, said: “As technology advances, the finance sector is often in the frontline of change. Organizations like the ones being recognized and celebrated in the Financial Innovation Awards, are vital in driving forward and progressing the future of the sector. These highly prestigious awards give companies the opportunity to demonstrate their ground-breaking and innovative approaches, which will go on to shape the future of the financial services industry and the value it provides. A huge congratulations to all the winners!”
See the list of all the winners and shortlisted finalists.
About the Financial Innovation Awards
The Financial Innovation Awards, held on Thursday 21 November at Hilton London Bankside, recognize some of the most innovative companies in the banking and finance sector.
This year 64 companies were shortlisted for awards in 22 categories covering: products & services; customer experience and delivery channels; responsibility and inclusion; and the future of financial services. 59% of the companies shortlisted were from the UK, while 41% were international including from the UAE, Canada, Bangladesh and Brazil.
About The London Institute of Banking & Finance