Edward Cable

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

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UPDATE – November 2020: We have built out a production-ready and scalable, enterprise-grade version of Payment Hub EE with support from the Gates Foundation over the course of 2020. It can be deployed as the gateway, integration and microservice orchestration layer for connecting to any real-time payment system.

View the documentation and access the source code or reach out to us on Slack for access to the lab environment to test out Payment Hub EE.

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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