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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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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Payment Hub EE wins 2022 Banking Tech Award for Best Contribution to Economic Mobility in Banking & Finance
The Mifos Initiative is honored to have our Payment Hub Enterprise Edition (PH-EE) chosen by Fintech Futures as the Winner of the 2022 Banking Tech Award for Best Contribution to Economic Mobility in Banking & Finance. Awards were given out earlier this December at the 23rd annual Banking Tech Awards hosted by Fintech Futures at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London.
It is as honor to have been selected from an impressive class of finalists including:
- Mcash Uganda Ltd – Mcash-MAAIF project (Highly Commended)
- TAG Fintech – TAG Fintech
- Standard Bank Group – Chama App
- Robocash Group – Robocash Group
This award recognizes projects using fintech/banking tech to champion financial inclusion and economic mobility. Examples include products/services for the underbanked communities and areas; products and services for specific demographics that are often overlooked, such as children and pensioners; innovative salary and benefits management tools; increasing financial literacy; promoting financial health etc.
This award builds off of our recognition in 2021 of Mifos X as the recipient of this same award as a catalyst for innovation by providing a core banking & account management platform delivered as open source building blocks to manage the store of value to embed financial services anywhere. For 2022, Mifos has now been recognized for our complementary open source payment orchestration engine, Mifos Payment Hub EE (PH-EE), which facilitates the movement of value by enabling institutions to seamlessly connect to any digital payment rail & enable the participation of the 3B underbanked in the digital economy. Payments are the gateway to financial inclusion with the means of transacting digitally as that first step towards financial health.
Mifos X, a catalytic foundation to manage wallets & accounts in the cloud is now coupled with Mifos Payment Hub EE, providing the capability for the entire industry to connect to digital rails including:
- Enabling MFIs/SACCOs to offer digital repayment/disbursements via seamless mobile money API integration
- Fintechs & financial institutions of any size to offer low cost, high volume, low value payments by connecting to & participating in instant interoperable payment systems like Mojaloop.
- Governments digitizing their bulk cash transfer programs/G2P schemes & rolling out CBDCs.
Payment Hub EE provides a highly scalable and extensible means to enable any institution to participate in a digital payment system regardless of size by:
- Abstracts the complexity of connecting via APIs through simple connectors
- Enables limitless participation in additional systems by simply building more connectors
- Low-cost deployment across shared cloud infrastructure via multi-tenancy
- Provides a highly configurable orchestration engine powered by Zeebe enabling the support for any use case and flow simply by creating new BPMN diagrams
- Rich user interface & monitoring for visibility into transactions and recourse on failed payments.
Payment Hub EE is now being actively deployed for a variety of use case across the globe including:
- Mobile money integration for agricultural loan repayments in East Africa
- Bulk payment pre-processing for G2P payment and social protection cash transfer programs.
- QR code merchant payments in Latin America
- Real-time payments integration with inclusive instant payment systems like Mojaloop.
- Instant and faster payments integration in Europe
- Cross-border remittances between the US and Asia
- Issuing gateway for Central Bank Digital Currencies in emerging markets.
Learn more about Payment Hub EE at https://payments.mifos.org.
You can view a list of all the winners and finalists.
About the Banking Tech Awards
The Banking Tech Awards recognise excellence and innovation in the use of IT in financial services worldwide, and the people who make it happen. 2022 was the 23rd year for these prestigious awards.
For banks and financial institutions, winning a Banking Tech Award showcases the value of their technology investments and showcases their skills, commitment, creativity and execution.
For software providers, a Banking Tech Award is a valuable recognition of the company’s products and services.
For individuals and teams, a Banking Tech Award is a prized acknowledgement of their skills, leadership, vision, inspiration and dedication to the industry’s betterment.
The 2022 awards ceremony took place on 1st December 2022 at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London.
The Banking Tech Awards are owned and produced by FinTech Futures, the definitive source of news and analysis of the global fintech sector.
Advancing the Open Source Primitives Moovment at Fintech DevCon 2022
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.
Lucky enough to get a selfie with the legend himself @wadearnold Thanks again for the awesome conference. I’m looking forward to #fintechdevcon 2023 and lots of building between now and then. pic.twitter.com/uHFRrslING
— Edward Cable (@edcable) August 26, 2022
I look forward to the fintechdevcon 2023 and trying to bridge the open source Mifos and Fineract community with Moov’s.
That’s a wrap. #fintechdevcon what a blast. Hats off to @wadearnold & @moov team for arranging one of the best conferences I’ve attended. Content was top notch and the ease of connecting along with the quality of connections I can’t put a word on how good it was. See you in 2023. pic.twitter.com/yBA1UITru1
— Edward Cable (@edcable) August 25, 2022
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.
That’s a wrap. #fintechdevcon what a blast. Hats off to @wadearnold & @moov team for arranging one of the best conferences I’ve attended. Content was top notch and the ease of connecting along with the quality of connections I can’t put a word on how good it was. See you in 2023. pic.twitter.com/yBA1UITru1
— Edward Cable (@edcable) August 25, 2022
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.
Scaling the Community to New Heights at ApacheCon
ApacheCon North America 2022 kicks off this upcoming week in New Orleans from October 3 to October 6. I’m looking forward to the first in-person gathering for Apache post-Covid and our first in-person Fineract/Fintech track. Many thanks again to Javier Borkenztain from Fiter for spearheading the track. Once again Mifos Initiative has played a key role in coordinating a number of speakers to be a part of the track. While unforeseen issues and delays with getting visas derailed the speaking opportunities for many of our international participants, we still have a diverse group of speakers that will provide a valuable means for the current ecosystem to come together as well as attract new members to our global movement to commoditize banking software.
The over-arching theme across many of the talks Mifos helped to arrange for the Fintech track centers around building and scaling the momentum that is growing around the project over the course of the past year. The continually growing rate of organic adoption across the public and private sector this past year demonstrates Mifos and Fineract as critical building blocks, digital public goods, and open source primitives for catalyzing financial services innovation. This increased adoption in turn has yielded greater upstream contribution resulting in more frequent releases, improved automation, greater stability and scalability across the platform.
At all layers of our projects from the core Fineract banking platform itself on down to our web and mobile apps, payment hub for payment orchestration, and OpenG2P for digitization of social protection programs, momentum is building. Our sessions will help continue and further catalyze that momentum with talks looking at the following:
- Mifos and Fineract as foundational and fundamental building blocks that accelerates innovation across the private and public sector whether as Open Source Primitives for banking, fintech and financial inclusion or Digital public goods and Building Blocks for the public sector for initiative like GovStack or OpenG2P
- Increasing the Scalability of Fineract to support fintechs operating at planet scale, the new wave of niche-focused neo-banks as well traditional retail financial institutions of all sizes looking to digitize and provide modern fintech solutions to their customers.
- Helping private and public sector institutions alike balance the needs of their solutions around stability, secrecy, and time to market with the community needs of transparency, agility, and maintainability for the project through a closer look at the mindset, processes, and policies across the community, organization and individuals to fuel upstream contribution and unlock a virtuous cycle.
- With this growth in upstream contribution, plotting out a Roadmap for Mifos and Fineract that establishes the horizon of where we should aim in the future, greater foresight of what’s coming in the near future, and clear signalling to the ecosystem around the boundaries of what and where to contribute.
- How Fineract can be at the cusp of bleeding edge technologies like CBDC issuance from governments, real-time payment adoption, and more.
A huge thank you to Rich Bowen and all the volunteers for coordinating an inclusive and engaging event that’s in-person once again!
Abstracts of each session can be found below. I look forward to seeing those who will be in person in New Orleans next week!
Mifos Welcomes Senior Advisor, Shashi Raghunandan
Mifos is pleased to welcome Shashi Raghunandan as a Senior Advisor, to provide strategic insight, partner engagement and thought leadership on payment related initiatives including G2P payments, cross-border payments and building out the open source community around Mifos’ Payment Hub EE.
Shashi brings 18+ years of payments and financial services background in developing and developed markets to Mifos. His work has encompassed a range of payment domains including remittances, disbursements, mobile money and card-based payments. He is passionate about digital rails that drives social change and working across both public and private sector to deliver impact. We look forward to having Shashi join Mifos and engaging with the broader community.
Welcome Tapasweni Pathak to Mifos for Google Season of Docs 2022
Mifos has the honor of participating in Google Season of Docs for the second year in a row. After much deliberation over a number of very promising technical writer candidates, we’re delighted to have selected Tapasweni Pathak to lead completion of our project, Update Platform and Collaboration Documentation for Launch of Mifos X 3.0.
Our project centers around building upon our consolidated user and developer documentation portals to update technical and collaboration documentation to reflect the major platform enhancements and streamlining we’ve made to our contribution and release processes. As you’ve seen on the mailing list, with the contribution from professional services customers of the Mifos Initiative, upstream contribution has increased greatly along with a greater cadence of releases. We needed to update our documentation accordingly with these major architectural enhancements supporting greater stability and scalability along with the automation and streamlining that have been added to our collaboration processes.
In a short time, Tapasweni has already demonstrated through her attention to detail, her vision for the project, and her strong project management vigor that she will add tremendous value to our community beyond this project alone. She is just getting up to speed so expect to see a lot of her on the mailing lists and on Slack. Read on to learn more about her in the words of Tapasweni herself. Join us in welcoming her to the community!
