Edward Cable

Payment Hub EE wins 2022 Banking Tech Award for Best Contribution to Economic Mobility in Banking & Finance

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The Mifos Initiative is honored to have our Payment Hub Enterprise Edition (PH-EE) chosen by Fintech Futures as the Winner of the 2022 Banking Tech Award for Best Contribution to Economic Mobility in Banking & Finance. Awards were given out earlier this December at the 23rd annual Banking Tech Awards hosted by Fintech Futures at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London. 

It is as honor to have been selected from an impressive class of finalists including:

  • Mcash Uganda Ltd – Mcash-MAAIF project (Highly Commended)
  • TAG Fintech – TAG Fintech
  • Standard Bank Group – Chama App
  • Robocash Group – Robocash Group

This award recognizes projects using fintech/banking tech to champion financial inclusion and economic mobility. Examples include products/services for the underbanked communities and areas; products and services for specific demographics that are often overlooked, such as children and pensioners; innovative salary and benefits management tools; increasing financial literacy; promoting financial health etc.

This award builds off of our recognition in 2021 of Mifos X as the recipient of this same award as a catalyst for innovation by providing a core banking & account management platform delivered as open source building blocks to manage the store of value to embed financial services anywhere. For 2022, Mifos has now been recognized for our complementary open source payment orchestration engine, Mifos Payment Hub EE (PH-EE), which facilitates the movement of value by enabling institutions to seamlessly connect to any digital payment rail & enable the participation of the 3B underbanked in the digital economy. Payments are the gateway to financial inclusion with the means of transacting digitally as that first step towards financial health.

Mifos X, a catalytic foundation to manage wallets & accounts in the cloud is now coupled with Mifos Payment Hub EE, providing the capability for the entire industry to connect to digital rails including: 

  • Enabling MFIs/SACCOs to offer digital repayment/disbursements via seamless mobile money API integration
  • Fintechs & financial institutions of any size to offer low cost, high volume, low value payments by connecting to & participating in instant interoperable payment systems like Mojaloop. 
  • Governments digitizing their bulk cash transfer programs/G2P schemes & rolling out CBDCs.  

Payment Hub EE provides a highly scalable and extensible means to enable any institution to participate in a digital payment system regardless of size by: 

  • Abstracts the complexity of connecting via APIs through simple connectors
  • Enables limitless participation in additional systems by simply building more connectors
  • Low-cost deployment across shared cloud infrastructure via multi-tenancy
  • Provides a highly configurable orchestration engine powered by Zeebe enabling the support for any use case and flow simply by creating new BPMN diagrams 
  • Rich user interface & monitoring for visibility into transactions and recourse on failed payments.

Payment Hub EE is now being actively deployed for a variety of use case across the globe including:

  • Mobile money integration for agricultural loan repayments in East Africa
  • Bulk payment pre-processing for G2P payment and social protection cash transfer programs.
  • QR code merchant payments in Latin America
  • Real-time payments integration with inclusive instant payment systems like Mojaloop.
  • Instant and faster payments integration in Europe
  • Cross-border remittances between the US and Asia
  • Issuing gateway for Central Bank Digital Currencies in emerging markets.

Learn more about Payment Hub EE at https://payments.mifos.org.

You can view a list of all the winners and finalists.

Banking Tech Awards 2022

About the Banking Tech Awards

The Banking Tech Awards recognise excellence and innovation in the use of IT in financial services worldwide, and the people who make it happen. 2022 was the 23rd year for these prestigious awards.

For banks and financial institutions, winning a Banking Tech Award showcases the value of their technology investments and showcases their skills, commitment, creativity and execution.

For software providers, a Banking Tech Award is a valuable recognition of the company’s products and services.

For individuals and teams, a Banking Tech Award is a prized acknowledgement of their skills, leadership, vision, inspiration and dedication to the industry’s betterment.

The 2022 awards ceremony took place on 1st December 2022 at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London.

The Banking Tech Awards are owned and produced by FinTech Futures, the definitive source of news and analysis of the global fintech sector.

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Edward Cable

Advancing the Open Source Primitives Moovment at Fintech DevCon 2022

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Ever since missing out on attending last year’s inaugural Fintech DevCon in 2021 where during her keynote, from Marble to Code, Angela Strange, partner at a16z, highlighted Mifos as one of the four disruptive open source technologies for banking, it has been on my radar to attend DevCon.

My first DevCon experience didn’t disappoint as it was one of the most memorable and impactful conferences I’ve attended to date. Now that Moov has posted all of the videos from the conference, I also want to re-share a recap I had posted on LinkedIn.

 

I along with Jose Alberto Hernandez Maldonado from Fintecheando were really honored to have been a part of the second annual #fintechdevcon as speaker leading a technical workshop showing how to Build a Neobank from Scratch using Open Source Primitives.

Wade Arnold and the entire Moov Financial team have done a stellar job of crafting an event that captures the essence and spirit of its community.

I look forward to the fintechdevcon 2023 and trying to bridge the open source Mifos and Fineract community with Moov’s.

Fintech DevCon really has me energized and motivated to see how the needs of the industry align with our strategy of commoditizing core banking infrastructure through open source primitives for retail banking and consumer financial services. 

From the keynotes to the roadblock talks to the hallway conversations, it was clearly evident how the approach we’ve taken and the community we’ve been building to bring financial services to the 3B underbanked can be transformative for fintech at large as well. 

It’s on me and the Mifos community to seize the momentum and help bring these fintech builders together so we can unlock our virtuous cycle and show how commoditized infrastructure can unlock more rapid and more effective innovation to advance the financial health for not just the base of the pyramid but everyone worldwide. 

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Edward Cable

Scaling the Community to New Heights at ApacheCon

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ApacheCon North America 2022 kicks off this upcoming week in New Orleans from October 3 to October 6. I’m looking forward to the first in-person gathering for Apache post-Covid and our first in-person Fineract/Fintech track. Many thanks again to Javier Borkenztain from Fiter for spearheading the track. Once again Mifos Initiative has played a key role in coordinating a number of speakers to be a part of the track. While unforeseen issues and delays with getting visas derailed the speaking opportunities for many of our international participants, we still have a diverse group of speakers that will provide a valuable means for the current ecosystem to come together as well as attract new members to our global movement to commoditize banking software.

The over-arching theme across many of the talks Mifos helped to arrange for the Fintech track centers around building and scaling the momentum that is growing around the project over the course of the past year. The continually growing rate of organic adoption across the public and private sector this past year demonstrates Mifos and Fineract as critical building blocks, digital public goods, and open source primitives for catalyzing financial services innovation. This increased adoption in turn has yielded greater upstream contribution resulting in more frequent releases, improved automation, greater stability and scalability across the platform.

At all layers of our projects from the core Fineract banking platform itself on down to our web and mobile apps, payment hub for payment orchestration, and OpenG2P for digitization of social protection programs, momentum is building. Our sessions will help continue and further catalyze that momentum with talks looking at the following:

  • Mifos and Fineract as foundational and fundamental building blocks that accelerates innovation across the private and public sector whether as Open Source Primitives for banking, fintech and financial inclusion or Digital public goods and Building Blocks for the public sector for initiative like GovStack or OpenG2P
  • Increasing the Scalability of Fineract to support fintechs operating at planet scale, the new wave of niche-focused neo-banks as well traditional retail financial institutions of all sizes looking to digitize and provide modern fintech solutions to their customers. 
  • Helping private and public sector institutions alike balance the needs of their solutions around stability, secrecy, and time to market with the community needs of transparency, agility, and maintainability for the project through a closer look at the mindset, processes, and policies across the community, organization and individuals to fuel upstream contribution and unlock a virtuous cycle.
  • With this growth in upstream contribution, plotting out a Roadmap for Mifos and Fineract that establishes the horizon of where we should aim in the future, greater foresight of what’s coming in the near future, and clear signalling to the ecosystem around the boundaries of what and where to contribute. 
  • How Fineract can be at the cusp of bleeding edge technologies like CBDC issuance from governments, real-time payment adoption, and more.

A huge thank you to Rich Bowen and all the volunteers for coordinating an inclusive and engaging event that’s in-person once again!

Abstracts of each session can be found below. I look forward to seeing those who will be in person in New Orleans next week!

Edward Cable

Mifos Welcomes Senior Advisor, Shashi Raghunandan

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Mifos is pleased to welcome Shashi Raghunandan as a Senior Advisor, to provide strategic insight, partner engagement and thought leadership on payment related initiatives including G2P payments, cross-border payments and building out the open source community around Mifos’ Payment Hub EE.

Shashi brings 18+ years of payments and financial services background in developing and developed markets to Mifos. His work has encompassed a range of payment domains including remittances, disbursements, mobile money and card-based payments. He is passionate about digital rails that drives social change and working across both public and private sector to deliver impact. We look forward to having Shashi join Mifos and engaging with the broader community.

Edward Cable

Welcome Tapasweni Pathak to Mifos for Google Season of Docs 2022

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Mifos has the honor of participating in Google Season of Docs for the second year in a row. After much deliberation over a number of very promising technical writer candidates, we’re delighted to have selected Tapasweni Pathak to lead completion of our project, Update Platform and Collaboration Documentation for Launch of Mifos X 3.0.

Our project centers around building upon our consolidated user and developer documentation portals to update technical and collaboration documentation to reflect the major platform enhancements and streamlining we’ve made to our contribution and release processes. As you’ve seen on the mailing list, with the contribution from professional services customers of the Mifos Initiative, upstream contribution has increased greatly along with a greater cadence of releases. We needed to update our documentation accordingly with these major architectural enhancements supporting greater stability and scalability along with the automation and streamlining that have been added to our collaboration processes.

In a short time, Tapasweni has already demonstrated through her attention to detail, her vision for the project, and her strong project management vigor that she will add tremendous value to our community beyond this project alone.  She is just getting up to speed so expect to see a lot of her on the mailing lists and on Slack. Read on to learn more about her in the words of Tapasweni herself. Join us in welcoming her to the community!

Tapasweni Pathak works with Microsoft Azure Core Engineering as a Principal Product Manager. She likes solving real-world problems, bringing transparency to things she gets involved with, and open source. Her research interests are operating systems, distributed systems, economics, and statistics. In past she has worked in Financial Innovation Services domain with Reliance Jio as Product Manager and Engineering Manager, her major involvements were bringing Jio Digital Wallet, Jio Digital Payments, travel, and transit in Jio Money online in smartphones. She has been deeply involved in open source and has contributed in her area of interests in different roles. 
She belives documentation is the most important part of delivering a usable product. Involvement with an idea, and delivering a product comes into a usable existence “after” technical writing. The Mifos Initiative has great depth in enabling democratization of financial services worldwide. Its users, community, local specialists, people involved, add to the unique structure that it builds to solve global financial inclusion and sustainable access to the financial resources problem. Being part of the community as a technical writer, to further drive the improvement and enhancement of its vast documentation would be an interesting challenge that she would love to work upon.
Edward Cable

Mifos and MOSIP to collaborate on next evolution of OpenG2P

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Recently the Digital Public Goods Alliance announced the forthcoming leadership and support from MOSIP to the OpenG2P Initiative. We’re excited to begin collaboration with MOSIP to chart OpenG2P to new stages of growth as we collectively address the widespread challenges in digitizing social protection programs and streamlining bulk cash transfers. 

Over the past year and a half with a seed grant from Paul Maritz, the Mifos Initiative has spearheaded the cultivation of OpenG2P as the leading advocate for DPGs for social protection, stewarded the first implementation along with DSTI for the Ministry of Education in Sierra Leone, and extensively evolved the OpenG2P framework of deployable building blocks under the leadership of Fynarfin. 

We have been able to position OpenG2P as a showcase of how multiple digital public goods can be brought together as a cohesive and composable solution to provide scalable, maintainable, cost-effective digital public infrastructure for a complex end to end governmental use case. 

OpenG2P has established itself firmly at the intersection of social protection and digital public goods as the technology and implementation layer to augment policy-level initiatives like G2Px and as a practicable and deployable architecture and set of open source building blocks that aligns with the broader GovStack and Digital Convergence Initiatives.  

 

The added leadership of MOSIP will help take the initiative to new heights:

  • Formalizing the governance structure to enable the participation of other DPGs and multilateral entities
  • Accelerating the adoption of OpenG2P by leveraging MOSIP’s extensive presence as a national digial identity solution
  • Advancing the roadmap of OpenG2P to be more modular, robust and capable of flexibly supporting the benefit delivery workflows of multiple ministries. 

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