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!