Ishan Khanna

GSOC Reunion – Interns’ First Trip To Silicon Valley!

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In this guest blog post, we’re delighted to have Ishan and Gaurav give a firsthand experience of their travels to the Silicon Valley for the first time to represent the Mifos Initiative as GSOC celebrated ten successful years at its Reunion. Ishan and Gaurav were awesome interns and have continued their stellar contributions in the community since GSOC – this experience was a small reward for their accomplishments. Read on for the recap and check out Gaurav and Ishan’s blog for more of their personal experiences and photos. 

fb-hqFirst off we’d like to thank Edward Cable, Community Manager @ Mifos Initiative, and all our mentors (Vishwas, Nayan, Markus, Sander, Michael, Kojo) for allowing both me and Gaurav Saini to be a part of this 10 year GSOC Reunion in San Jose, California. A dream that we lived through experiencing all the highs that you could get without the use of illegal stuffs 😀 Yeah the food, the weather, the people and the headquarters of the Big Who’s Who in the IT world.

I had travelled on the East Coast (NYC, Washington DC, Alexandria, Jersey City) of the USA for a week before we landed on the West Coast (San Francisco.) Gaurav and I planned to tour the Silicon Valley for three days before the summit. We reached SFO on 20th October, 2014. Playing smar,t we rented out beds in a house in Millbrae, CA that was just 10 minutes away from SFO using AirBnb. It was a hacker house, where we met a few entrepreneurs, a designer, a developer, a director and a teacher too. We immediately realised we were in a good company. I’ll be sharing the pre-post summit experience on my personal blog, lets get to business and explore the GSOC reunion. Read more

Dayna Harp

You Asked, We’ve Listened

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One of the big challenges after Mifos X is installed and configured is how to train the end user. Thanks to an energetic group of volunteers, we have a great start to a four-part end-user deployment tool kit to help solve this challenge.

Like everything else we do, the end-user tool kit is open source. There is a set of operational policies that will help the financial institution implement best business practice right at the start of using Mifos X. The policy samples are located on the wiki pages – https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/docs/Operational+Policy+Samples+for+Financial+Institutions and can be downloaded and customized for each organization.

The next part of the tool kit is a set of operational procedures. This documentation is intended for the end user and will walk an employee through the organization’s steps for customer service from greeting the customer, accepting an application, keying in the appropriate information in Mifos X and closing out at the end of the day. All of these are available for download so that they can be customized for the financial institution. https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/docs/Create+Savings+Account

To accompany the operational procedures, we have uploaded sample forms that the organization may require. Like all pieces of the tool kit, these forms can be downloaded and customized for quick implementation. The forms include Loan Application, Membership Application, Loan Guarantee Agreement, Adverse Action, Cash Balancing and more.   https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/docs/Operational+Sample+Forms+for+the+Financial+Institution

And finally, our Google Code-In 2014 participants have been doing a great job creating a set of training slides that can be used by deployment partners and financial institution training staff to get end users up to speed in using Mifos X in their daily work. https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/docs/Training+Slides

The Operational Tool Kit is 95% complete at this reading. All pieces will be in place by the end of this year. The Mifos Initiative is a thought leader for technology-enabled financial inclusion. We are committed to achieving our mission by delivering accessible technology designed to service the Base of the Pyramid by providing tools and best practices for responsible financial inclusion and endorsing standards for openness and transparency. The Mifos Initiative provides the only open source core banking system and, It is the only organization that builds a suite of support around this system.

To learn more about our Operational Tool Kit or to offer suggestions to improve it, contact Dayna Harp, Director of Strategic Initiatives. She will coordinate your questions and suggestions to make sure we provide the best tools for financial inclusion.

Edward Cable

Google Code-In – A Whirlwind Week One

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GCI-2014-b-squareWith just over a week of Google Code-In under our belts, and just about six weeks remaining, we want to collectively take a breath and thank all the students for their valuable contributions. The energy and enthusiasm of the pre-university students who’ve contributed to our cause has kept all our mentors on their feet, whipping up new tasks to keep these blossoming open source contributors busy. Looking back on this hectic week, we’ve all been impressed with the knowledge and experience of our students and the ease with which they’ve been making an impact. All in all we’ve already 80 tasks completed by 27 different students.

First off, in case you’re wondering what Google Code-In is: it’s a “contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students aged 13-17) with the goal of encouraging young people to participate in open source.” Students complete tasks and earn points and in turn prizes. Tasks introduce students to all the work that makes open source projects possible and can be anything an organization needs help with, from bug fixes, to writing code, to user experience research, to writing documentation. This video does a great job of explaining the program which is now in it’s fifth year.

We are proud to be participating as a mentoring organization for GCI for the first time. As the world aims to bring computer science to millions of students this week through the Hour of Code led by Code.org, students and teachers this a great way to begin coding. Read more

Edward Cable

Star Contributor of the Month – Terence Monteiro

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terence-nymtrsWe’re recognizing Terence Monteiro of San Jose Solutions from Bangalore as our Star Contributor. Terence has only been a part of our community since late June but he’s exactly what we look for in a partner – an amazingly talented contributor who lights up our community with his passion for our social mission. He’s eager to share his talents and give back to the community in all ways. Listening to him talk, you can hear the genuine enthusiasm he has and the conviction with which he carries out his work. Join us in congratulating Terence who has many good things to come including more successful deployments and innovation for the community. 
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Edward Cable

Introducing the Mifos Partner Council

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When we launched the new Mifos Initiative, one of our biggest goals was to give the community more ownership and accountability for the direction of the platform and growth of the community. It’s my pleasure to formally introduce our Mifos Partner Council, a formal advisory council to the Mifos Initiative staff and board.

Comprised of members of the Mifos Partner community, its role is to provide recommendations for creating a sustainable Mifos user community by building a better Mifos platform and a stronger partner community. Specifically, the Partner Council is intended to provide input in areas including, but not limited to the following areas documented in the Partner Council Terms of Reference: Read more

Banking Reinvented – Open, Cloud & Mobile

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Video from James Dailey’s talk at FinDEVr is now live. Watch his invigorating talk on using the Mifos X open technology platform to bring financial services to the 4 Billion underbanked worldwide. We’re helping financial innovators deliver banking as a service in the cloud and via mobile devices. For full details, see our page on the Finovate website and James’ blog from the event.

 

Edward Cable

Announcing Mifos X 1.25: WebHooks, Accrual Accounting, Declining Balance with Interest Recalculation

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The core team and community have been hard at work at continuing to broaden the functionality of Mifos X and make the platform more extensible for our ecosystem of partners. This release delivers on some must-have financial and accounting features with support for perodic accrual accounting with point-in-time accruals, true declining balance with interest recalculation with support for configurable rest periods and compounding settings, the ability to pre-pay loans, bulk JLG loan applications, and a whole range of usability enhancements.  On the architectural side, we’ve built out a WebHooks framework with a proof-of-concept Twilio SMS integration, shipped our Batch APIs for improved performance, and an Executable WAR for quick installation of Mifos X. Download Mifos X 1.25 now or request a trial instance to try it out for your organization. Read more

Edward Cable

Star Contributor of the Month – Markus Geiß

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We’re recognizing Markus Geiß as our Star Contributor. He’s a one-of-a-kind volunteer that stepped right in and immediately became a tight-knit member of the community. In the brief 6 months he’s been here, he’s become a dedicated mentor, a sage architect, a proficient contributor, a respected committer, and most importantly a trusted friend. Join us in congratulating Markus who was also recently recognized by Social Coding 4 Good as their Featured Contributor (pictured in his now famous flower photo from back in the day). 
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Dayna Harp

October 16, 2014 Take a Moment to Applaud Financial Co-Operatives

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Join nearly 208 million credit union members in 103 countries who recognize and celebrate the credit union difference by taking a moment to reflect on the financial co-operatives history and to ponder its achievements.

International Credit Union (ICU) Day® has been celebrated on the third Thursday of October since 1948. The day is recognized to honor those who have dedicated their lives to financial inclusion, recognize the hard work of those working in the credit union / SACCO / Co-Operative community and show members appreciation.

This year’s ICU Day will take place on Oct. 16, 2014. Its theme, “Local Service. Global Good,” emphasizes credit unions’ positive impact in their communities and around the world.

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James Dailey

Talking about Financial Inclusion to Financial Innovators at FinDEVr

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James Dailey, board member and Chief Innovation Officer for the Mifos Initiative, spent this week at FinDEVr San Francisco with Vishwas introducing the Mifos X platform to the world of fin-tech innovators. 
This week was terrific. I was able to geek out about financial inclusion for hours, give a presentation about the powerful Platform that the Mifos team has built, learn what other tech is up and coming, and share the narrative of why Mifos as a rallying concept – open source, open APIs, cloud, mobile – is so important for building the financial services that people everywhere deserve.
The FinDEVr conference at UC San Francisco Conference Center was not the typical conference for Mifos. Attendees were representing some of the largest payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal) and their development efforts were focused on use cases that are quite removed from the world of microfinance or building the basic payment networks in emerging markets.

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