Star Contributor of the Month – Mohit Kumar Bajoria

screen-shot-2017-02-24-at-10-52-45-pmWe’re recognizing Mohit Kumar Bajoria of Jammu, India. Mohit has been a member of our community since he joined us a GSOC intern in March of 2016 and worked on adding browser-based offline access to the Community App underneath the mentorship of Gaurav. Since then he’s continued to excel and be an active part of the community first by acting as a GCI mentor and now by taking the initiative to fix the remaining bugs in the re-skin so it can be shipped to the community. These past couple of weeks, Mohit has really demonstrated his leadership by stepping up to become maintainer of the re-skin branch all on his own doing – he’s been mentoring other contributors, squashing lots of bugs, and reviewing and merging incoming pull requests. This call to leadership has been opportune as we seek empowered individuals from the community to stabilize and maintain Generation 2 as we transition to Generation 3. 
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User in Focus – Chaitanya

This regular blog series will shine the light on the financial institutions that are using Mifos or partner-led solutions powered by Mifos? We want to share the impact and benefits Mifos is helping you have on your clients as well as the personal experiences and lessons you learned while deploying your solution.

Chaitanya – Bangalore, India 

Chaitanya is an NBFC serving more than 170,000 rural clients in the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra. Their mission is to improve the lives of low income families through the provision of Financial Services. They are using FinFlux, a core banking solution powered by Mifos built by Conflux Technologies.

Chaitanya has its roots as a local NGO working in the rural parts of Central Karnataka. It was founded in 2004 by the late Mr. Ramesh Paineedi, a school teacher. It started work in chaitanyafinfluxthe area of children’s education and gradually moved into supporting rural microenterprises through its partnership with Small Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund (S3IDF), a US based NGO. Anand Rao (a Promoter in Chaitanya), built the partnership between the NGO and S3IDF while working with the latter.

The S3IDF and Chaitanya partnership helped create more than 25 microenterprises in rural Karnataka in the area of electricity supply to un-electrified households, Self Help Group (SHG)-owned and operated enterprises and IT based enterprises. Through the partnership, equity support, bank guarantees and debt financing support was provided to these microenterprises. Additionally they also arraned microcredit through the local regional rural bank, Pragathi Grameen Bank, to self help groups for activities such as LPG and electricity connection. Arranging financing for SHGs helped Chaitanya gain experience in the microcredit space and laid the foundation for starting Chaitanya, the MFI, as an NBFC.      

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Chaitanya was incorporated in March 2009 and MFI operations started in October 2009 after obtaining a fresh NBFC license from RBI. The initial promoters of the MFI were Anand Rao and Samit Shetty. As the MFI operations started, the NGO activities were completely wound down.

Chaitanya now reaches 170,000 clients with a portfolio of 3 Billion INR or about $45 Million USD. They hope to grow by 50% CAGR for the next two to three years. Chaitanya focuses on the rural markets, reaching 20 of the 30 districts in the state of Karnataka and 2 districts in the state of Maharashtra. Chaitanya offers a variety of Group Based Credit Products in the form of JLG loans ranging form INR 5,000 to 35,000 and Business and Housing JLG loans from 35,000 to 60,000.  Individual Loans for 2 Wheelers, Housing and Small business loans varying from 100,000 INR to 500,000 INR. Read more

ThitsaWorks begins Mifos training in Myanmar

The following is a guest post from May Thu Myint, Communications Officer of ThitsaWorks, Inc.

On January 26th, ThitsaWorks began a 2-day Mifos training session for 2 local MFIs. The training was conducted by the team at Conflux Technologies from India. The attendees were taken step-by-step through Mifos’ core functions and capabilities.
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Day 1 covered client management, products and organization management. Day 2 focused on all aspects of accounting.
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Many MFIs in Myanmar still rely on software such as Excel to manage their portfolios, due to lack of funds or lack software and technical support. Some do not use computers at all, relying on paperwork instead.
Win Htet Maung Maung, the managing director of Unique Quality Microfinance, attended the training with some of his senior staff members. Founded in 2013, Unique Quality provides microfinance loans in 6 different townships in Yangon and currently has over 10,000 active clients.

“Now that we have the infrastructure to support technology like this, I have very high hopes for the microfinance sector in Myanmar.” he said. “A system like this will be good not just for MFIs, but also for clients and the quality service we can provide to them. Approval processes will become less time consuming, meaning clients can get loans faster.”266079_30376af55ff247b88f0d1c842812457f-mv2_d_3264_2448_s_4_2

Who we are: ThitsaWorks provides financial technology solutions for microfinance institutions in Myanmar. As Mifos’ first ever partner in Myanmar, ThitsaWorks is dedicated to making basic financial services available to all and empowering people to rise out of poverty and that technology is a key tool in making this happen. With Mifos X, we can help MFIs in Myanmar grow and reach out to the unbanked population. We believe that financial inclusion can put an end to poverty.

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2016 Google Code-In Wrap-up

We had the honor of participating in Google Code-In for the second time this year. Google Code-In is Google’s program to introduce pre-university students to the world of open-source by working on a range of bite-sized (3-5 hour-long) tasks including coding, outreach/research, documentation/training, user interface, and quality assurance.  

In this year’s program, 1,340 students from 62 countries completed 6,418 tasks mentored by 17 different open source organizations. We worked with 34 students who completed 159 tasks. Participation was a bit lower than during our first year in 2014 but we still received many valuable contributions and most importantly made a lasting impact on students by showing them what it’s like to work on an open source project. Read on to learn more about our five finalists and their GCI experiences. 

Coding contributions included enhancements and bug fixes to both our Mifos X web app and Mifos Android Field Officer app. For our documentation, students helped to create training slides, record video tutorials, improve technical docs on our wiki, and update screenshots throughout our user manuals. As we push further into new geographies and pioneer new fintech innovation, the dozens of country market research briefs on financial inclusion and fintech will be immensely valuable. Students even got to try their hand at design by creating wireframes and mockups for our website and mobile self-service app.

Thank you to all the students who participated, thank you to the Google Open Source Programs staff for administering the program and thank you to all our mentors including several new community members. Our mentors this year were Shreyank, Gaurav, Rajan, Prathmesh, Adi, Nikhil, Nayan, Tarun, Mayank, Mohit, Nazeer, Santosh, Simmi, Daniel, and Saransh. Tarun, Mayank, and Rajan were an especially big help with the mobile development tasks we had available.

Read on below for a brief glimpse into our 5 finalists. Our 2 grand prize winners will be going to the Google campus along with their parents for four days in June. They will be joined by one of our mentors. So stay tuned later this summer for a recap of this fun event and amazing rewards for all these students.

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Infrastructure: Mifos X vs. Apache Fineract

As we’ve made the transition to moving development over to our Apache Fineract community, we have added some additional layers of complexity and confusion. We now have multiple mailing lists, multiple issue trackers, and multiple source code repositories. We’ve tried to address these in various webinars and developer meetings but wanted to make clear where you should go to ask questions, where you should go to report issues, and where you should go to grab the source code.

Mifos X versus Apache Fineract

A line of clarity we must first draw is Mifos X vs. Apache Fineract. Prior to the transition to becoming an Apache project, Mifos X was the software platform. From the moment we became an Apache project, Mifos X, the software platform became Apache Fineract. Mifos X now refers to the open source product distribution led by the Mifos Initiative that is built on top of Apache Fineract. Just as Musoni Services provides Musoni System or Conflux Technologies provide Finflux, Mifos X is another distribution on top of Apache Fineract.

The Mifos X distribution is an entire out-of-the-box solution that is a value-added distribution for financial inclusion.  which includes a web app (formerly referred to as community app), a mobile app for field officers, soon a mobile app for clients, reports powered by Pentaho and a data import tool. This distribution is released and available for download via SourceForge from the Mifos.org website. It is directed towards partners and user looking for a readily deployable solution including the Apache Fineract platform, a web user interface, and corresponding mobile apps.

The Apache Fineract is a general core banking system with just the back-end and APIs and no front-end. Developers and Innovators looking to build on Apache Fineract should go directly to GitHub and grab the source code for Apache Fineract (see below).

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