Dayna Harp

Mifos, SACCOs and Credit Unions

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Mifos, SACCOs and Credit Unions

The Perfect Marriage

If ever two movements were meant to work together, it is the credit union movement and the Mifos initiative.  We have a shared mission to end poverty, we have shared principals, member control, independence and cooperative methodologies. Together we can accomplish a lot.

The Mifos Initiative was honored to host a webinar “Transforming Financial Inclusion: Mifos, SACCOs & Credit Unions” attended by 130 financial inclusion influencers, developers, volunteers and financial institutions – all focused on the same mission – bringing financial services to the 3 billion unbanked in the world.  Cooperative growth and the strong alignment between Mifos & Credit Unions was the main theme of the presentation.

From its very origin, the credit union community has been dedicated to helping one another grow since its German beginnings in the mid 1800s.  Picture1Because of people wanting to help people by pooling their money to make small loans, the credit union movement was born.  Through a spirit of cooperation, credit unions rapidly spread throughout Europe, India, North America, South America, Africa and the rest of the world.

The Mifos platform began with similar humble roots in microfinance providing a free and open source lending platform to reach the unbanked.  Because of people wanting to help people gain effective and afformifos-tag-transparentdable technology, the Mifos Initiative was born.  Today Mifos X has extended its reach to all types of financial service providers – Cooperatives, SACCOs, Credit Unions, Banks and even runs as the core system for sophisticated financial delivery systems.

Today the unserved are in emerging markets around the globe.  These markets are all about digital financial services.  We are witnessing considerable growth in in digital payments, in remittances, and in mobile money.  To be a modern financial institution – even in the most remote parts of the world – we need to have a modern connected core banking system.  Obviously this needs to be VERY inexpensive.  Mifos X being free and open source is that system.

Mifos technology is the future of financial services.  Everyone is moving into this brave new world of digital, cloud based service delivery; when you adopt  Mifos, you will be miles ahead and ready for the challenges of tomorrow.

Take some time to look at the recorded webinar and see how – together – we make impactful change.

 

 

Edward Cable

Announcing Mifos X 15.03: Mandatory Savings, Individual Collection Sheets, OAuth 2 Support, Context-Sensitive Help

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On April 06, 2015 we shipped our first major release for 2015, Mifos X 15.03. With the release, we’ve adopted the new release numbering framework identified by the year-month of the date of the scheduled release. Mifos X 15.03 contained a great deal of new technical and security enhancements, functional improvements to the loans and accounting module, as well as some improved usability. OAuth 2 Support as well as stricter password configuration policies will provide more robust authentication mechanisms. Bulk Collection Sheet Entry for Individual Loans as well as Mandatory Savings accounts are not supported. The loans module now allows for fixed loan product parameters, configurable working days, multiple options for interest calculation on pre-closure, greater flexibility during the approval and disbursal process for multi-tranche loans, and improved rounding off rules for EMI repayments. For the accounting module, one can now migrate opening balances as well as configure fees to be mapped to liability accounts. Last but not least, Mifos X 15.03 now has a significant amount of context-sensitive help including tooltips and dynamic help menu links.  Please view the Mifos X 15.03 release notes for full details.

UPDATE: On May 18, 2015, we shipped the first service pack or hotfix release, Mifos 15.03.1. This released contained new functionality such as a loan products that support a compounding period that is independent from the rest frequency period, improved filtering and searchability on client/groups/center listings, and nearly three dozen bug fixes and UI enhancements. Please view the Mifos X 15.03.1 release notes for full details.

Many thanks go out to all the contributors who made this release possible – especially our core team, partners like Conflux Technologies and Musoni Services, as well as a number of new features that were worked on the high school students who participated in our Google Code-In projects.

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Edward Cable

2015 Mifos Community Choice Awards – Honoring our Finest

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Throughout the year, so many acts of kindness, ingenuity, and dedication go unheralded. Now in their second year, we formally recognize those community members who through the leadership and service to the project, serve as shining examples to the entire ecosystem of how we can each do our collective part to create a world of 3 Billion Maries. The post below recaps our Community Choice Awards  dinner which took place on March 12, 2015 at during our Global Summit in Sharjah. Over a fine dinner and some impromptu entertainment led by Amit Jain, we honored our finest community members:

  • Most Innovative MFI (sponsored by Google): Elevate Africa
  • Most Dedicated Platform Solution Partner: Musoni Services
  • Most Dedicated Deployment Partner (sponsored by ThoughtWorks): Intrasoft Technologies
  • Technical Volunteer of the Year (sponsored by Liberty Mutual) –  Markus Geiss
  • Non-Technical Volunteer of the Year – Dayna Harp
  • Distinguished Service Award –  Nayan Ambali

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Edward Cable

2014-2015 Global Mifos Summit Recap

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My fellow colleagues and community members have shared a number of posts about their personal experiences at our Global Summit in Sharjah, UAE but I’m certain you’ve been waiting for the official recap. It’s hard to believe that already a month has passed since the dust settled from our time together in the UAE. There have been so many opportunities to follow up on and so much forward progress being made with the initiative that I haven’t had the chance to do the formal recap till now.

Once again our gratitude goes out to Paul Maritz, the lead sponsor of the summit as well as our silver-level sponsors, Google Open Source Programs, the ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program, and Liberty Mutual whose financial sponsorships made it possible for a record number of delegates to attend the event. Education/travel stipends from GSOC also made it possible for four of last year’s GSOC graduates to attend. While we didn’t have a local host to guide the event like we had in the past, Amit Jain stepped up in immeasurable ways to help with on-the-ground coordination, supplies, and most importantly securing visas for our foreign delegates.

Global Mifos Summit – Growing & Evolving Community

  • 2014-2015 Summit

  • 2013 Summit

  • 2012 Summit

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The road leading up to this year’s summit threw a fair share of obstacles our way – after two venue and schedule changes detouring us from East Africa we finally were able to come together in a globally central location. While we weren’t able to incorporate a field visit into the summit, we were able to have the most diverse and geographically widespread participation of our all summits to date. Here are some statistics at a glance:

  • 80 delegates from 22 countries including representation first-time attendees from the following countries: Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Denmark, Burkina Faso, Germany, UAE, Nepal, Uruguay, and Belize.
  • More than 70% were attending for the first time including:
    • 22 first-time attendees from financial institutions,
    • 12 rookie platform solution partners, in attendance
    • 13 first-time delegates from deployment partners
    • 5 new volunteers, and 4 first-time board and staff

This fresh crop of summit attendees is a testament to the continued growth and evolution of our community – while the core remains in place, we continue to reach new regions and new segments of the sector.

Wrap-Up

 

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Edward Cable

Results of the First Mifos Summit Hackathon

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If you haven’t seen it, check out the blog of Michael Vorburger for a recap of the day-long hackathon, he and Markus Geiss facilitated at the tail-end of our Global Summit back in March. Decked out in their new Mifos hoodies, our coding Ninjas led a productive day of development on the platform, the community app, and our Android app. They hacked out some solutions to needs that came up during the summit and were able to train and bring up to speed some of the newest developers within the Mifos community.

 

 

Edward Cable

Financial Inclusion Newsflash – April

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A roundup of some of the notable news in the financial inclusion, fin-tech, mobile money, and open source circles:

Making Progress Towards 3 Billion Maries

World Bank has released the results of the latest Global Findex data and progress is being made. The Center for Financial Inclusion has nicely recapped the report on their blog: The number of unbanked individuals has dropped from 2.5 billion to 2 billion as account penetration increased by about 20 percent or 700 million adults, bringing the world’s banked rate from 51 to 62 percent. India and China account for most of this jump in financial inclusion but 43% of “banked” Indians hadn’t made a deposit or withdrawal in the past twelve months.

The data also confirms the growth and penetration of mobile money in sub-Saharan Africa where 12% of adults (versus 2 percent globally) have a mobile money account. 45% of these mobile money account holders rely on it alone for formal banking which is promising for the potential of digital financial inclusion in other regions. We are delighted to see the overall growth in universal access and optimistic that adoption and true inclusion will be brought about through the transition to digital financial inclusion. We are eager for the Mifos X platform to be a part of that shift by serving as a common technology foundation for others to innovate from.

You can read the full report at The Global Findex Database 2014: Measuring Financial Inclusion Around the World and also download the data itself to analyze and visualize it.

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Dayna Harp

Star Contributor of the Month – Ishan Khanna

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Meet Our Star Contributor for March 2015 – Ishan Khanna

Ishan entered The Mifos Community as a Google Summer of Code 2014 participant where he grabbed hold of Android Client and built out the native Android field operations app for Mifos X users. Over the course of last summer, Ishan took the community from no mobile app to full functionality. His work can be seen in the Mifos Android Client User Guide.

IK SummitIshan didn’t stop there. He has been active in the Community ever since – even though he has a full-time job with SeekSherpa. He has contributed major bug fixes and engaged others in the community. During the 2015 Summit, he made contributions to several partners including FINA in Georgia to help get their remote app to full functionality. Tengiz Merabishvili from FINA says, “Ishan helped us a bunch, he is a great developer. He is very energetic and knowledgeable. He is a hard worker and once he sets his mind to do something, he always gets it done. I enjoyed our brief time working together, and learned a lot.”

In Ishan’s own words, “I am an insatiable geek, striving for perfection in software.  I love giving Tech Talks and motivating people about FOSS Development.” He has two and one-half years Android Platform experience. He has a gained good grip on Java, Android SDK, Git, Gradle and other related technologies in this period.

Q.  On what projects are you currently working?

A.  I’m working on an app that will allow travellers to connect with locals and change the way travellers see a city these days. TL;DR – Disrupting the Conventional Travel Experience.

 Q.   What is most rewarding about working with the Mifos Community?

A.  The opportunity to meet, work with and learn from people in Global Mifos Summit, having experience in the industry more than my total living age. And to represent Mifos Initiative at Google Summer of Code Reunion in San Jose, California in October, 2014.

 Q.  How do you play when you aren’t working?

India Love in DubaiA.  When I am not working I am usually digging into new frameworks, languages and tech blogs. Find food across the world through YouTube. Or watching “The Big Bang Theory”.

Perhaps painting his face in support of India while in Dubai slipped his mind. . .

Thanks Ishan for your contributions and your joyful spirit!

Dayna Harp

The Roots of The Mifos Initiative

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As told by James Dailey, Chief Innovation Officer, at the 2015 Mifos Summit

james-headshotHere is my Mifos story. Back in November 2001 I took a trip to visit a microfinance program outside of Hyderabad, India. I met a group of women who had gone through a process of learning how to save first, then to take out a loan – Microfinance-101.  There were mountains of paper forms: forms for groups, for ledgers, for receipts, for new loans, for repeat loans filled out by the loan officers and for processing at a branch office.   Aside from being profoundly humbled by the dedication these women had to bettering their lives, I realized that data really mattered to MFIs! Providing a service in the field efficiently and effectively mattered AND data enabled that.

I decided to stay the night in the branch office so I could be at the morning borrower meeting. That night, we were literally locked into the same room as the safe with a guard and shotgun downstairs and another outside.  As I fell asleep staring at stacks of paper forms, and imagining similar rooms, thousands of them across the world, I had an epiphany: there had to be a better way.  4140326923_3473a3a7ea_o

As I watched the data being entered into a PC the next day, I came to understand that there was no easy ‘low cost’ system for microfinance operations. Instead they and many others had built their own portfolio systems, or were trying to or they were working with under capitalized software companies.  MFIs implementing their own systems made as much sense as everyone writing their own operating system, so that’s when an idea popped in: Why not an open source, community driven operating system for financial services? Read more

Markus Geiss

How the Silk Road turns into a path to meet Friends

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Contributing the first post in our summit wrap-up blog series is Markus Geiss, who attended his first Mifos Summit, and will soon be joining the team full time as Chief Architect. Read on to hear Markus’ tale of his time in Sharjah.

On Monday March 9th I boarded the plane to fly to Sharjah and meet with the Mifos Community at our annual summit. I was all alone and didn’t know what to expect. As I left Sharjah on Friday March 13th my heart was filled with impressions and new friends.  What happened?

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It all started immediately upon my arrival in Sharjah. I met the Conflux Gang right at the airport. As we reached the hotel a crowd of people from all over the world already awaited us and gave us a hearty and warm welcome. During the course of the following three days it simply felt like meeting good old friends who we have not seen for a while. Read more

Edward Cable

Global Mifos Summit Wrap-Ups

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Our Global Mifos Summit in Sharjah has come and gone in a flash yet once again it was an incredibly invigorating time and exciting to see all the new opportunities and momentum that is building across the community.

We’ll be posting photos, notes, and major takeaways from each of the sessions but we thought the best way to share the summit with those who weren’t able to attend is through a firsthand look from the attendees of our summit. We’ll start with a series of blog posts from our staff but welcome any community members to write a blog post and share.
In the meantime, if you did attend the summit and haven’t filled out your feedback form, please click here to do it now. It will only take a few minutes and help us to make our future events more valuable and effective for all in attendance.
We don’t want all the wonderful ideas or fruitful discussion to get lost so please post your notes to the Summit Hackpad.
If you took photos, please share them on our Google+ event page.