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. 

Here are some highlights from the conference and how they resonated with our mission and approach:

 

  • Lou Anne Alexander’s opening keynote on launching Zelle closed on the point of how fintech builders “have the ability to change the lives of so many revolving around how we move money.” This resonates even more for our community who is directly working on financial inclusion to reach the underbanked.

  • Gabrielle Columbro’s talk on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Open Source demonstrated the need for more fintech consumption and contribution to open source. Mifos and Fineract can provide a platform for these fintechs to innovate on, level the playing field with bigger players, help them get to market faster, and power commercial open source business models to be sustainable.  
  • During the Building and Scaling Fintech Panel with Terry Angelos, Ben Metz, & Wade Arnold to see how driven Ben Metz of Jack Henry is to help community financial institutions digitize and stay relevant in a world of increasing fraud and competition with banks, fintechs and the platfins of the world. As they modernize their core systems from the 80s, our open source primitives could be a good foundation for them and would be transformative to have a legacy provider become part of the open source ecosystem. 

 

  • Future of financial services fireside chat with Yolande Piazza and Sam Meule of Google Cloud made it clear that consumers clearly have unmet needs for fintech solutions and we could be building better apps and services that address overall financial health. 

  • Anshu’s keynote showed how more often platforms emerge from applications that have optimally solved single use cases and continue to grow. I can see that firsthand in the organic growth of our software from an MIS for joint-liability group lending to a widespread platform for digital financial services.

  • Ben Blaine’s talk on Building a Programming Banking dev Community from Scratch was inspirational in showing how creativity, passion, and ingenuity can catalyze so much innovation and collaboration. I can only dream of what we could achieve if we could inject just a morsel of Ben’s energy into our processes!

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