Showcasing the Fineract Ecosystem at ApacheCon

ApacheCon 2021 is underway and a big shout out to Javier Borkenztain from Fiter for organizing the Fineract Fintech track with a diverse range of speakers and panelist from within the community and beyond. A huge thank you to Rich Bowen and all the volunteers for coordinating an inclusive and engaging virtual event. Once again I’m looking forward to the second-ever Fineract track as a great means to:

• Showcase and highlight Mifos & Fineract adopters, and the breadth of use cases the platform has been able to support
• Explore the evolution of the community and how we can grow and adapt to enable more widespread participation and upstream contribution to enable a virtuous cycle.
• Practically discuss how to enhance and evolve the platform to meet the growing scalability and performance requirements as more and more digital banks and fintechs adopt the platform as well as expand the functional footprint to support broader and deeper verticals
• Take a glimpse into the future of Fineract and the innovations around AI, the cloud, mobile, digital identity, decentralized finance, central bank digital currencies and more that will shape the future of financial services.

Over the past year, as the Mifos Initiative has worked more directly with innovative financial institutions and fintechs to build out their solutions on Fineract, we have seen firsthand the immense opportunity and need for the platform. We are endorsing a broader mission of democratizing financial services and embracing our long-standing position of making core banking commoditized infrastructure that enables financial services to be embedded anywhere and everywhere.

It’s always great to see cross-pollination with other communities so I’m looking forward to the participation from other exemplary members of the open source community like Graham McBain from Moov, Joseph Jacks from OS Capital, and Kelly Switt from Red Hat, and Kanchana Welagedara from JP Morgan and FINOS. 

Through our close connections to various individuals throughout the Mifos and Fineract ecosystem, we have been helping to facilitate a number of presentations and panels on the Fineract Track: 

Use Cases Powered by Fineract and Mifos

OpenG2P One Year On: Leveraging Open Source for Government Infrastructure

Wednesday, September 22 at 1710 UTC

Moderator – Jill Shemin

Panelists: Keyzom Massally – OpenG2P Co-Founder, James Dailey – Mifos, Steve Conrad – DIAL/Govstack , Victor Romero – Fintecheando

As the industry starts to convene around collaborative models to advance open source building blocks for government infrastructure, like the Digital Public Goods Alliance and the GovStack initiative, this presents a key opportunity for the Fineract and larger Apache Software Foundation community. Jill Shemin will be moderating a panel including co-founders of the OpenG2P initiative, members of the GovStack coalition, and vendors implementing open source with governmental agencies. They’ll explore the challenges and opportunities in enabling governments to not only consume but also contribute to open source.

Revolutionizing Financial Services in Africa on Fineract

Thursday, September 23 at 19:40 UTC

Moderator: Ed Cable

Panelists: Ademola Babalola – OpenFactor | Peter Kakoma – Kanzu Code | Godfrey Kutumela – HT Consulting

The African continent is a perfect showcase of the ongoing innovation and potential scale and impact that can be achieved by the Fineract community. Emergent technologie and regulatory trends are converging together to enable deeper financial inclusion and meaningful usage of financial services to the underbanked. Our panel of innovators will highlight their experiences supporting use cases around financial inclusion through SACCOs and MFIs, innovation through fintechs and embedded finance, more inclusive and cost-effective financial services through banks, platfins, and telcos, as well as the economic mobility enabled by digital payment rails and mobile money. 

Fineract for Regulated Credit Unions

Thursday September 23 at 1850 UTC

Moderator: James Dailey | Panelists: Art Muthiora | Rupesh Raikundalia – Tyarya | Luisa Martinez – Kuelap

There has always been an enormous alignment between the philosophies and ideals of open source and the cooperative ideals of member-owned financial institutions like credit unions, cooperatives, and building societies. Our panel includes a range of participants seeking to digitize these institutions ranging from SACCOs in emerging markets to building societies in the UK to credit unions in the US and Canada. This moderated panel discussion will dig into the functional alignment and define the process by which regulated credit unions could adopt the solution set 

Informal yet Impactful: Digitizing Savings-Led Financial Inclusion

Tuesday, Sept 21 at 1850 UTC

Panelists: Wes Wasson from DreamStart Lab | Sofie Blakstad from Hive Online | Robert Timmer from Cardano Development

A panel made up of innovative-savings-led fintechs that will explore the untapped potential of savings-led financial inclusion,  the need and benefits of digitization and the approaches they’ve taken, the innovation it enables, and the roadmap for how Fineract can better support this innovation. 

Future of Open Source Fintech

Payments: The Next Frontier

Thursday, September 23 at  18:00 UTC

Panelists: Istvan Molnar – DPC Consulting | Godfrey Kutumela – HT Consulting | Victor Romero – Fintecheando 

A new frontier for payments is on the horizon with the continued widespread adoption of national real-time payment systems, the acceptance of global standards like ISO 20022, the emergence of open banking APIs for third party payment initiation, and the continued growth of mobile money. This session will explore the emerging trends and standards around payments, a showcase of the Payment Hub EE and its roadmap in shaping our long-term vision to enable the sector to go beyond payments, remittances, and transfers to the next frontier of meaningful, value-added payments – for-purpose remittances, interoperable cross-border transfers, split payments to multiple parties, merchant/billpayer requests to pay, rich invoices, and more.

AI For All: Enhancing Digital Financial Services using Data Science

Tuesday, September 21 at 15:00 UTC

Speakers: Abhijit Ramesh | Jeremy Engelbrecht – Softidoc

The Mifos AI for All working group will highlight its progress on its roadmap, refining existing use cases and adding new use cases to optimize the customer journey.  Abhijit will share the progress on our stand-alone credit scoring module and a future roadmap item around federated and democratized learning to address data challenges. Jeremy will hone in on the specific algorithms to be used for each use case with a deeper dive on cutting edge research into deep learning and neural networks for credit scoring.   

Offgrid Payments and ID 

Wednesday September 22 at 18:50 UTC

Speaker: Orang Dialameh – CTO, ExtoPAY

Identity security, wallet balances, and payments capabilities do not extend to billions of people, partly because the hardware and software models are based on always on data and connectivity. What if hardware based security in an appropriate form factor could be used to secure off-grid payments, enable merchants and individuals to self- register with biometrics, and create an entirely new payment rails at the edge. This talk will explore the work we’ve done around this concept, and the linkages to blockchain and legacy payment and wallet systems.

Architecture of Central Bank Digital Currencies

Wednesday September 22 at 14:10 UTC

Speaker: James Dailey

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are an emerging set of blockchain and cryptographic enabled solutions that taken together forms a national cryptocurrency. It has the support of the International Bank of Settlement (IBS) as a promising area of innovation. Can CBDCs challenge the status quo of banking systems? How does the CBDC allow the Central Bank to do clearing and settlements across different assets class better? What would a global architecture look like? What would cause Central Banks to adopt CBDCs? How does this relate to one basic-account-per-person provide for an economy? This is survey of the current discussion and speculation on the future of CBDCs.

Community Evolution

State of the project and State of the Industry

Tuesday, September 21 at at 15:50 UTC

Speaker: James Dailey

James Dailey highlights the direction of the community and the project based on the latest survey of its community 

Fineract Roadmap 

From Monolith to Microservices: Modularizing Fineract 1.x

Wednesday, September 22 at  18:00 UTC
Speakers: Aleks Vidakovic – Monkeys in Town | Istvan Molnar – DPC Consulting | Nayan Ambali – Finflux | Victor Romero – Fintecheando 

Day by day, as user base of Fineract continues to grow with more neobanks, fintechs, embedded finance players, and platfins adopting the platform, the need for higher levels of scalability and performance and greater degrees of modularity and ease of development is ever-heightened. Our panel brings together seasoned architectects and experts from the Fineract community to present a vision and plan to modularize Fineract 1.x to be more future-proof to address current pain points, future needs while minimizing disruption to ongoing operations of our ecosystem.