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.
Edward Cable

Vishwas Babu – Winner of the 2015 Pizzigati Prize

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tides-pizzigati-tony-2It’s rare to meet individuals like Vishwas Babu who are so intelligent and gifted yet so dedicated and devoted to helping others. Vishwas has an enormous heart and a brilliant mind yet is so truly humble in all his actions. We are so excited to announce that he’s been selected as the 2015 Pizzigati Prize Winner by the Tides Foundation.

Join us in congratulating Vishwas Babu of Conflux Technologies for this well-deserved recognition for his visionary leadership and his tireless commitment to customers. Read more

Edward Cable

100 Million Project: Our Commitment to Social Performance Management

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We’re honored to have been invited to participate in the Microcredit Summit Campaign’s 100 Million Project to end extreme poverty. Our commitment centers around the PPI in both our pledge to have it fully integrated within the platform for both recording and reporting on the scorecards as well as adoption of the PPI through our customer and our partners. We want to take the PPI and Social Performance Management much further than we have before – making it its own module in the platform with not only the ability to capture scorecards but to sample, target, and benchmark that SPM to provide actionable results.
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We also don’t want PPI just to be another feature in the software and part of our commitments is to ensure adoption amongst our community. We stand ready to help at least half a dozen Mifos customers adopt the PPI in 2015 as well as getting three of our partner fully trained to implement the PPI and roll out a social performance management framework.

As part of announcing our commitment for 2015, we’ll be hosting an e-workshop led by the Microcredit Summit Campaign on February 19th at 1600GMT. Our workshop will focus on why the financial inclusion sector needs to embrace open platforms to reach it’s full potential. We’ll speak to the benefits of open technology, open business models and how we are using community-driven development and support to scale financial inclusion. This e-workshop will feature some of our standout community members including Craig Chelius, our Executive Director, volunteer Markus Geiss, and Cameron Goldie-Scot of Musoni Services.

Register for the E-Workshop

Read more

google accounts help center

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But manual monitoring of each and every article or web site will take way excessive time, how do we do this daunting task. I don’t know about you however the scary thing about online community is the age groups of users appears to be expanding a growing number of this means a growing number of of my children members seem to add me on those sites. Providing intend to certainly be a true extension of the customer organizations; trying to deliver the outcomes they must improve the quality of customer support and satisfaction to enhance their operating margin. One can also upload more photos as opposed to previous products of Google.

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The truth is it can be not really a one time thing and it’s only going to acquire worse. It’s exactly about getting personal and driving sharing and between Circles and Sparks it’s clear that Google is on top of that. A sitemap is definitely an XML based file which contains all in the links to several pages on your web site. This means few people scroll for the bottom from the page or continue for the second or third page.

It is obviously vital that you possess a complete understanding of one’s trading platform as a way to operate a business smoothly and profitably. Your keywords should vary rather than say the identical thing. Using Map – Reduce or Hadoop allows a company to scale and potentially perform better. You will probably be asked several questions, your URL address, Country, time zone, and name.

Mark your posting since public in the event you would like everyone to find out it. If you are unable to afford a small business website page the you should use Google+ as business page. The headline is the most important part of one’s ad so you should use a headline that will create a visitor select it immediately. exactly where shall we be now when it comes to SEO and social media marketing.

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How Try Using A Men Signet Ring To Be A Wedding Ring

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Button pearls have flat bottoms and round dome so seem very round from forward side. We stock them for all sizes, from 3-4mm all the way to 12-13mm huge sizes in wonderful colors such as white, pink, mauve, black, chocolate, light green and cranberry other people. If you are interested in individual button pearls even worse your own pearl earrings or pearl pendants, please check out our “Individual Pearls ” right under “Buy Pearls & Strands come up with Jewelry “at the left page.

An individual might be willing to marry her because this , she’s the most effectively for you. So do not settle for half determine. Gift her the best ring you are going to. Gift her a diamond wedding band. When you are buying click here for john Greed voucher , there couple of points that you need to keep idea. First is the cut of lemon. There are variety of cuts available in market , like-heart, round, pear, princess, oval, triangle, emerald, radiant, marquise, cushion and asscher. For engagement rings, round cut is preferred mostly, as it gives the ring clarity and brightness. What is the carat measurement also are major role in the quality of diamond.

Why They think Diamonds Are Forever – I had been in a sitting room reading Forbes Magazine buying time before a corporate meeting. While waiting, I couldn’t help but notice four professionally dressed women gathered around 1 their girlfriends who had recently been proposed into. She was beaming as she displayed her multiple.5 carat diamond engagement ring. Her girlfriends, all single, talked, but not about marriage or their wedding day, but about being proposed to and receiving their highly in demand diamond gemstone.

Diamonique stones are constructed from the finest rough, there are no blemishes. Diamonique stones are cut to all shapes; probably the most popular being round, marquise, emerald, pear, oval and square. The carat dimensions of a diamonique is corresponding to that associated with an regular gem. They are enabled to have the particular and brilliance of real diamonds with fraction with the cost. Diamondique can be set in silver, gold or yellow metal. Or you can buy Diamonique epiphany platinum over sterling silver for just about any really good price. The Diamonique stone is included as all colors; some include red, yellow, green, blue, pink and violet. They also can be obtained as simulated gemstones.

Finally, will not lose her for giving you an answer right off the lot. Even if both of you have been talking about it, and you feel she is more than ready to marry, when you are be a tad of a surprise. Let her know, in case you propose, she doesn’t have to give an answer absent. Let her think about her decision before she says yes.

Edward Cable

Announcing Mifos X 1.26: Improved Guarantor Management, Teller Cash Management, Configurable Account Prefixes and more

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Just in time for the new year, we shipped the latest release, Mifos X 1.26.0, on December 23 which provides a range of new functionalities across our suite of lending and savings products as well as a number of usability enhancements and bug fixes. Major new features include support for capturing guarantee requirements for loans and blocking/holding funds on guarantor accounts, a beta version of our teller cash management module, new statuses for client life cycle, the ability to map liability accounts to fees, ability to update deposit amounts for active recurring deposits, support for capture client images from a linked webcam, and functionality to configure account prefixes on client, loan and savings accounts. With the range of bug fixes and UI enhancements, there are more than 75 tickets fixed in this release. Download Mifos X 1.26 now or request a trial instance to try it out for your organization. Read more

Ishan Khanna

GSOC Reunion – Interns’ First Trip To Silicon Valley!

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In this guest blog post, we’re delighted to have Ishan and Gaurav give a firsthand experience of their travels to the Silicon Valley for the first time to represent the Mifos Initiative as GSOC celebrated ten successful years at its Reunion. Ishan and Gaurav were awesome interns and have continued their stellar contributions in the community since GSOC – this experience was a small reward for their accomplishments. Read on for the recap and check out Gaurav and Ishan’s blog for more of their personal experiences and photos. 

fb-hqFirst off we’d like to thank Edward Cable, Community Manager @ Mifos Initiative, and all our mentors (Vishwas, Nayan, Markus, Sander, Michael, Kojo) for allowing both me and Gaurav Saini to be a part of this 10 year GSOC Reunion in San Jose, California. A dream that we lived through experiencing all the highs that you could get without the use of illegal stuffs 😀 Yeah the food, the weather, the people and the headquarters of the Big Who’s Who in the IT world.

I had travelled on the East Coast (NYC, Washington DC, Alexandria, Jersey City) of the USA for a week before we landed on the West Coast (San Francisco.) Gaurav and I planned to tour the Silicon Valley for three days before the summit. We reached SFO on 20th October, 2014. Playing smar,t we rented out beds in a house in Millbrae, CA that was just 10 minutes away from SFO using AirBnb. It was a hacker house, where we met a few entrepreneurs, a designer, a developer, a director and a teacher too. We immediately realised we were in a good company. I’ll be sharing the pre-post summit experience on my personal blog, lets get to business and explore the GSOC reunion. Read more

Dayna Harp

You Asked, We’ve Listened

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One of the big challenges after Mifos X is installed and configured is how to train the end user. Thanks to an energetic group of volunteers, we have a great start to a four-part end-user deployment tool kit to help solve this challenge.

Like everything else we do, the end-user tool kit is open source. There is a set of operational policies that will help the financial institution implement best business practice right at the start of using Mifos X. The policy samples are located on the wiki pages – https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/docs/Operational+Policy+Samples+for+Financial+Institutions and can be downloaded and customized for each organization.

The next part of the tool kit is a set of operational procedures. This documentation is intended for the end user and will walk an employee through the organization’s steps for customer service from greeting the customer, accepting an application, keying in the appropriate information in Mifos X and closing out at the end of the day. All of these are available for download so that they can be customized for the financial institution. https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/docs/Create+Savings+Account

To accompany the operational procedures, we have uploaded sample forms that the organization may require. Like all pieces of the tool kit, these forms can be downloaded and customized for quick implementation. The forms include Loan Application, Membership Application, Loan Guarantee Agreement, Adverse Action, Cash Balancing and more.   https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/docs/Operational+Sample+Forms+for+the+Financial+Institution

And finally, our Google Code-In 2014 participants have been doing a great job creating a set of training slides that can be used by deployment partners and financial institution training staff to get end users up to speed in using Mifos X in their daily work. https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/docs/Training+Slides

The Operational Tool Kit is 95% complete at this reading. All pieces will be in place by the end of this year. The Mifos Initiative is a thought leader for technology-enabled financial inclusion. We are committed to achieving our mission by delivering accessible technology designed to service the Base of the Pyramid by providing tools and best practices for responsible financial inclusion and endorsing standards for openness and transparency. The Mifos Initiative provides the only open source core banking system and, It is the only organization that builds a suite of support around this system.

To learn more about our Operational Tool Kit or to offer suggestions to improve it, contact Dayna Harp, Director of Strategic Initiatives. She will coordinate your questions and suggestions to make sure we provide the best tools for financial inclusion.