Edward Cable

Mifos and Mojaloop – an End to End Open Source Architecture for Digital Financial Services

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I’m pleased to announce the ongoing collaboration between the Mifos Initiative and the Mojaloop community being funded by a strategic grant from DIAL (Digital Impact Alliance), and their Open Source Center. With the funding from DIAL, we’re embarking on the first step in our vision to create an end to end open source architecture for digital financial services, integrating Mifos and Mojaloop. Mojaloop provides the digital payment rails and Mifos provides the account management engine fueling innovation on top of them. Working with the team at DPC Consulting in Hungary, we have created a Mifos lab which provides a live environment for digital payment transactions to flow through a Mojaloop switch, initiated from accounts held at Digital Financial Service Providers (DFSPs) running Fineract and Fineract CN as their account management system. We had the honor and pleasure of joining the Mojaloop community and demoing this at the recent community convening in Arusha, Tanzania.

In Tanzania we could see the strong progress being made around the codebase and the growing force of the Mojaloop community. Post the convening, the tremendous momentum continued with a number of announcements centered around Mojaloop adoption across all segments of the financial services sector.  The Central Bank of the Republic of Tanzania announced the development of TIPS, the Tanzania Instant Payment System, of which they’ve chosen to adopt Mojaloop as the basis for their same-as-cash electronic payment system. WOCCU announced its digital financial inclusion strategy to reach 50 million-plus people across Asia centered around  a project to design interoperable, open-loop, low-cost, real-time payment platforms for its global network of credit unions across Asia, exploring the use of the Mojaloop open-source platform. Great progress is being made with the launch of Mowali, the mobile wallet interoperability initiative powered by Mojaloop, and led by Orange and MTN to enable interoperable payments across all of Africa. The DFS Lab Mojaloop Hackathon in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, in mid-April is fast-approaching and will give fintech companies an opportunity to develop and test innovative use cases on Mojaloop. 

The Mifos Initiative looks forward to being an enabling factor in not only extending the functionality of Mojaloop and evangelizing the platform but most importantly enabling and accelerating adoption by providing a robust lab environment and a Mojaloop-ready open source toolkit of account management systems, mobile wallets and a payment hub to facilitate the smooth integration with the Mojaloop APIs. Our vision is to provide the account and wallet management capabilities for an institution that wants to connect to Mojaloop whether they’re a SACCO or MFI, a fintech company, a mobile wallet provider, or even a bank.

Thank you to DIAL for enabling this collaboration, the DPC team for their stellar work, the Gates Foundation for enabling our participation at the convening and the Mojaloop community and ModusBox team for all their support with the integration. 

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Edward Cable

Mifos Partners with Corent Technology to Transform Delivery of Core Banking Platforms via SaaS

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We’re excited to announce our collaboration with Corent Technology to transform the delivery of both our 2nd and 3rd generation Mifos solutions via the cloud through their SaaS enablement solution, SurPaaS®. We’re eager to work with community members that would like to pilot using Mifos X as a SaaS solution through Corent’s solution as well as partners who’d like to leverage the SurPaaS stack to deliver a cloud-hosted solution at scale. Please view the full press release or read on below:

ALISO VIEJO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Corent Technology, a technology leader in cloud migration, optimization and SaaS enablement, has teamed up with the Mifos Initiative to launch Mifos X financial application as a fully instrumented SaaS solution, to facilitate access to core banking services for the over 3 billion unbanked and underbanked world population, a major step toward eliminating extreme poverty in under-developed communities.

“We are pleased to support the Mifos Initiative – a leader in financial inclusion and microfinance technology – in their mission to enable financial institutions to bring responsible financial services to the over 3 billion people who are without effective access today,” stated Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology.

“Such a bold mission, serving potentially thousands of smaller financial institutions, requires a SaaS solution that is highly automated and scalable and that can be easily deployed, efficiently delivered and affordably managed. By powering the Mifos X Platform with the SaaS-enablement capabilities of SurPaaS, we are pleased to be a part of empowering this global initiative,” added Fatehi. Read more

Edward Cable

Explorations: Yoti – Digital Identities as a Force for Good

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This post is part of our Explorations series, where we invite experts from across the global tech community and our ecosystem to impart their wisdom and knowledge. Identity is a crucial part of delivering responsible fintech and a topic that is actively being discussed across our community right now.  We’re happy to have Ken Banks, the Head of Social Impact at Yoti, share this guest blog post describing their recently announced social impact strategy. Ken will also be leading a webinar as part of our Mifos Community Webinar Series on March 18 at 1400GMT via GoToTraining outlining Yoti and its commitment to designing and delivering solutions that can make digital identity a force for good. 

Please read his blog post below, explore the their social impact strategy (.pdf) and join the webinar on March 18. Mifos is looking for institutions across the community who are ready and willing to participate in digital identity pilots we will be kicking off with organizations like Yoti and the Sovrin Foundation.

Webinar on Yoti: Digital Identities as a Force for Good

Register now for webinar on March 18 at 1400GMT to earn about Yoti’s social impact strategy and commitment to GoodID

Over the past few months our Social Impact team has been busy carrying out research across Africa, South East Asia and the United Kingdom to better understand digital identity needs and opportunities in these locations. We’ve been speaking to experts around the world and attending digital identity and humanitarian events to get a sense of who is doing what, where. Our findings have led to the development of an exciting user-focused, evidence-based Social Impact Strategy which we are proud to be launching today, along with an updated section of the Yoti website. Read more

rbrown

Star Contributor of the Month – Abhay Chawla

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This month we are extremely excited to recognize Abhay Chawla as our Star Contributor of the Month, and first of 2019! We are recognizing Abhay for his wonderful involvement in several areas of the Mifos community. Since wrapping up his Google Summer of Code internships, he’s stayed steadily involved with the community – spearheading the documentation and evangelism to onboard new contributors during Code for Good week. He then went on to serve as a mentor for Google Code-In, sharing his experience and wisdom with high school students. Now, he’s mentoring Chirag Gupta on an internship to bring to completion the web app rewrite he started. Abhay is always thorough, articulate, and patiently ready to guide others to contribute! Read more

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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