Mifos 2023 Year in Review
In 2023 Mifos & Fineract demonstrated massive scalability for the public & private sector. In 2024, we will be a catalytic force for digital public infrastructure.
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Archive for year: 2023
Mifos Welcomes Board Member, Min Tha Gyaw
We are excited to formally announce the newest member of our Board of Directors, Min Tha Gyaw. Min is a global leader in inclusive fintech with more than two decades of experience in banking and payments culminating in his current role as Chief Strategy Officer for ThitsaWorks. Min will be a critical part of positioning the digital public goods maintained by Mifos to accelerate the impact of instant inclusive payment systems globally and the adoption of digital public infrastructure to advance universal financial health. His keen vision across digital financial services, his proven ability to execute, and his highly respected perspective in the ecosystem will unlock new opportunities for collaboration, sustainability, and innovation for initiative.
Here’s a bit more on Min in his own words:
Min brings more than 18 years of experience in payments, core banking, credit analytics systems, as well as expertise in banking and investments. He currently serves as the Chief Strategy Officer of ThitsaWorks, a Singapore-based technology firm, where he oversees the firm’s partnerships and successful expansion into Latin America, the Caribbean, and key African markets. Min is a member of the Mojaloop Community Council, and he also leads ThitsaWorks’ engagement and contributions to the Mifos Initiative, Interledger Protocol, and other Digital Public Goods initiatives.
Before joining ThitsaWorks, Min held several senior management positions with leading commercial banks in Myanmar, spearheading numerous strategic initiatives to introduce innovative products and solutions. A strong advocate for financial inclusion, Min leveraged his banking expertise to pioneer lending to Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in Myanmar, in collaboration with multiple international Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). Min received his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a Graduate Certificate from Johns Hopkins University (SAIS), and a B.A. in Economics from Beloit College.
We have already been collaborating closely with Min in the past and are eager to have him as part of the Board to impart his deep wisdom and strong connections by assisting in the following areas:
- Provide strategic insight to help the Mifos Initiative stay at the forefront of trends in digital payments and financial services
- Assist in the formulation of strategic partnerships with stakeholders across the public and private sector to help strengthen the Mifos presence across the digital public infrastructure landscape.
- Assist in fundraising and strategic planning to ensure the sustainability and viability of the Mifos Initiative as a thought leader and innovator in inclusive fintech.
- Fundraising, market development, partner engagement, and strategic development around inclusive instant payment systems and the shared infrastructure in which to deliver them.
- Helping refine our product development and project delivery strategies around Mifos, Fineract and Payment Hub EE to more fully align with other digital public goods like MOSIP and and Mojaloop and the priorities of cross-sector funders.
Please help in welcoming Min to the Mifos Community as a board member! We are extremely grateful for his time dedicated to our initiative and community!
Powered by Mifos – Advancly
This regular blog series will showcase partners and the innovative solutions they’ve built that are powered by the Apache Fineract and Mifos X platforms. These case studies will demonstrate your solution to end users who are seeking to use them as well as show other partners in the community how they too can leverage the Apache Fineract platform to build their own solutions powered by an open source core banking infrastructure.
Advancly: Powering Progress
According to the World Bank, formal MSMEs in sub-Saharan Africa face a huge finance gap of $331 billion (USD). This is largely because they are unable to provide key information about their businesses to traditional/corporate lenders. But financing is key to the survival of these businesses who, beyond accounting for 60% of jobs in Africa, are representative of the dreams and aspirations of entrepreneurs and many times key to the survival of them and their families.
For the most part, MSME financial requirements are too large for microfinance banks but too small to be effectively served by corporate bank models. This leaves a “missing middle” in the need of the right financing options, with financial need that stands at over 1.6 trillion USD (formal and informal SMEs).
Advancly exists to bridge the lending gap for the missing middle. We provide businesses across Africa and emerging markets with debt capital and embedded finance services, enabling them to utilise credit to grow and scale. Through technology, we harness data that provides a backdrop for intelligent and automated credit risk assessment. By adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence that allows for a robust credit-scoring, we work to ensure that our non-performing loans remain lower than industry realities.
Overview of the Team/Company
Advancly is powered by a team of analytic, strategic and creative thinkers who work daily to build human-centred credit solutions. We are enabling entrepreneurs and founders to succeed at building their economies by building their dreams.
Our ethos is backed by our belief that, when businesses progress, society progresses. For us, progress simply means “better”. It is the daily efforts put in to create a positively different reality. It is when a business can serve one more customer and sell one more product. It is when an entrepreneur moves one step closer to building the business of their dreams.
CEO Profile
Lotanna Julian is the CEO and co-founder of Advancly. With an astute background in finance, strategy, operations and investment portfolio management, Lotanna leads Advancly’s skilled team in their mission to Power Progress for MSME’s across Africa and emerging markets by innovating access to credit through capital, data and technology.
Lotanna has a vast experience in global business operations and investment portfolio management, which have proven invaluable in the Advancly journey and grown the company in record time. Lotanna and the Advancly team are looking to take the business to 10 countries by 2026 – with the goal of injecting $500m into MSMEs across Africa and emerging markets.
Star Contributor of the Month – Victor Romero
We are pleased to recognize Victor Romero as the Mifos Star Contributor in this July 2023 edition of Star Contributor of the Month. Victor has been a long-time member of the Mifos community, serving in many different roles throughout the years such as being a mentor for Google Summer of Code and Apache Fineract committer, and we are thankful to him for his tireless efforts to help create a world of 3 billion Maries. We appreciate the hard work and passion that Victor brings to our community, and we are excited to see what he has in store for the future. Words can’t capture how valuable Victor has been to the community – he embodies what an active contributor should do as he never hesitates to share his knowledge or make his skills available to assist the community. While not all of his contributions are publicly visible, I can’t count the numerous calls or meetings Victor has joined to share requirements, guide an intern or spearhead a project. No matter the ask, Victor always steps up to help the community and with any project or successful milestone he or his team has, he’s ready to share those lessons learned.
Meet the 2023 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns
Our 2023 intern programs are well underway and our interns are making great progress. Google Summer of Code is now in its 18th year and Mifos has the privilege of participating for the 8th time independently and 11th year overall. Once again we were blessed with the selection of 10 interns through Google Summer of Code. However we had such a high-quality number of applicants yet a limited number of slots to select them for GSOC that we have also offered an additional 4 internships separately through our inaugural Mifos Summer of Code. So give a big welcome to all 14 of our interns who will be contributing this summer and to all of their mentors who have been guiding them on their journeys. We will be sending regular updates to the mailing list on progress and hosting mid-term and end of program showcases to keep the community informed of their work.
While our primary aim for Summer of Code is to build the next generation of open source contributors who will become the future maintainers, committers, and builders across our ecosystem, the projects this year will be quite impactful for the community with valuable enhancements to our existing projects as well as new exploratory work. Between Google Summer of Code and Mifos Summer of Code, we’ll have five interns working on our mobile apps, 2 interns working on the web front-end, 2 working on security and penetration testing, 2 on the Fineract platform or DevOps, and 3 AI-related projects.
On the front-end, Pushpendra Kumar will be enhancing the new Web App to consume the auto-generated typescript client to be more maintainable and synchronized with Fineract releases while Radha Thakare will explore the next generation of our web UI by building out a POC of a modular UI framework containing micro-front-ends.
All of our mobile apps will be getting some attention with Pratyush Singh and Abhishek Gururani working across Mifos Mobile our mobile banking app to refine its architecture, upgrade its libraries, improve the security of its connection to the Fineract back-end and extend its consumption of the mobile UI library and Android SDK. The mobile wallet will be getting similar treatment from Rachit Gupta with upgrading of dependencies, streamlining of the UI with the mobile UI library and genericizing the use cases it supports for a mobile wallet that represents that majority of global wallet use cases. Aditya Gupta will be enhancing the Android Client for field officers to further consume more of the Android SDK and complete its migration from Java to Kotlin. Lakhwinder will be splitting his time between the mobile UI library but also completing our open banking fintech app and extending it to integrate with the Mojaloop PISP APIs for third party fintech innovation.
On the back-end Fineract platform, Abhinav will be leveraging his experience in converting monolithic apps to microservices architectures by enabling greater Fineract modularity by extending the customer module layer designed by Aleks Vidakovic across more packages in Fineract. On the DevOps front, Elijah Okello, will be helping to demonstrate the power of Mifos, Mojaloop and Payment Hub EE by providing an easily deployable package along with demonstrate storyboards and use cases to showcase the power of IIPS powered by DPGs. Both Kerlyn Manyi and Yash Sancheti have extensive experience with cyber security and penetration testing and will be putting Fineract as well as the Mifos web and mobile apps through rigorous security, penetration testing, and static analysis under the mentorship of Godfrey Kutumela. Meghna Bajoria, with support from Jeremy Engelbrecht, will be resurrecting our Mifos Chatbot for Fineract to take advantage of the latest advances in AI and LLM. As part of Mifos Summer of Code, both Deepthi M and A Patel as medium-duration projects will be working our Vision PPI app to make the app itself functional and refine the cloud vision analytics for image processing for PPI scorecards.
Mobile Apps – Mifos X
Pratyush Singh – India
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Abhishek Gurarani – India
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Rachit Gupta – USA
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Mifos X Web Apps
Pushpendra Kumar – India
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Radha Thakare – India
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Fineract Platform, Security & DevOps
Abhinav Sinha – USA
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Elijah Okello – Uganda
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Meghna Bajoria -USA
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Kerlyn Manyi – Cameroon
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Yash Sancheti – India
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Mifos Summer of Code Interns
Deepthi Mavillapally- India
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A Patel – India
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Aditya Gupta – India
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Lakhwinder Singh Sarao – India
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