Edward Cable

2014 Banana Skins – Using Technology To Manage Future Risks

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banana-skinsThe 2014 Banana Skins report is out and although we’ve only just started to skim the report, the summarized findings once again point to the critical role of technology and the potential our platform has to address “future risks” facing the industry.

The Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI), Citi Foundation, and CFI in their annual report on the risks and challenges facing the microfinance sector has pegged Strategy as one of the new areas of concern. Quoting the recap of the study, both internal and external stakeholders are concerned financial institutions aren’t looking forward enough and ready to respond to new forces/trends shaping the market: Read more

Edward Cable

Star Contributor of the Month – Laurie Wilmot

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FLaurie Wilmotor the month of June, we’re recognizing Laurie Wilmot as our Star Contributor. While initially entasked with simply working on documentation in our user manual she’s gone so much further. Laurie has helped with usability, providing feedback and suggestions on the design and flow of the user interface. She’s done quality assurance reporting numerous bugs, has made various functional enhancement suggestions, and helped to comprehensively think our full suite of documentation and support for using and implementing Mifos. 

Laurie is only just a newcomer to the community but she’s come on with such vigor and commitment that we rarely see from volunteers. We crossed paths with Laurie through the British Columbia Institute of Technology Technical Writing Program. Each student takes on an industry placement where they contribute 80 hours as a volunteer getting practical experience. We have been lucky enough to work with several students on our User Manual Project. Read more

Edward Cable

Corent Delivers Mifos X as “SaaS in a Box”

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Corent recently announced that Mifos X is now available on their SurPaaS platform which will allow Mifos partners to easily deploy and operate localized versions of the Mifos X Platform “as a service” and efficiently support large numbers of local and regional financial institutions. 

Corent will be hosting a webinar on July 2 at 1400 GMT via GoToTraining to showcase Mifos X on the SurPaaS platform.  Read more

Markus Geiss

GSoC ’14: A mid-term experience

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Working with strangers spread all over the world can be a double-edged sword. You’ll face the “Time Zone Pain”, barriers in communication, and cultural pitfalls. On the other hand you’ll meet like minded geeks that share the same passion, coding for good – making the world a better place.

The Mifos community offered me the possibility to mentor a project for this years Google Summer of Code. It took me one light-second to agree. I love to share my experience and knowledge with others and I was lucky to find my counterpart with Rishabh. He is a 3rd year undergraduate student from Jammu in India.

During the last 6 weeks he is like a sponge absorbing everything, advancing his knowledge on a daily basis and increasing his coding skills like I never expected. We communicate at least once a day and we start to become friends. We not only talk about our project, we talk about our families, circumstances in life and even our plans for the weekend. Read more

Paul Maritz
Craig Chelius

Mifos Initiative Launches Mifos X Platform

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June 11, 2014 – San Francisco, CA

Mifos Initiative Launches Mifos X Platform for Financial Inclusion : Free and Open Source Software for Financial Institutions Bringing Financial Services to the Poor in Developing Countries.

Mifos X was officially launched at a hugely successful event in San Francisco. Over 100 people from the tech industry  and non-profits attended the launch event. The event was graciously hosted by Paul Maritz, our chairman, at the Pivotal Labs in downtown San Francisco (Paul is CEO of Pivotal).

Paul opened the event with exciting remarks about the power of platforms and how Mifos X has been completely rebuilt as a open platform that brings together providers of capital with the poor that can use that capital to lift themselves out of poverty. Paul forecast that as an open platform that encourages innovation in financial services for the poor, Mifos X will be a global force in financial inclusion. Paul sees the next five years as being instrumental for Mifos. Read more

Edward Cable

Mifos Initiative Launches Mifos X Platform for Financial Inclusion

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Free and Open Source Software for Financial Institutions Bringing Financial Services to the Poor in Developing Countries

SAN FRANCISCO, June 13, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Mifos Initiative today launched its Mifos X Platform for Financial Inclusion. The Mifos X Platform is a free and open source core banking system for responsible financial services organizations bringing financial services to the 3 billion unbanked poor globally – the proven method to lift the poor permanently out of poverty.

Developed and supported by a global ecosystem of volunteers, donors, and technology partners, Mifos X is used by microfinance institutions, credit cooperatives, and savings institutions in developing markets.

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Gleb

Global Launch of the Mifos Initiative – Pivotal Labs in SF June 11 at 630pm

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We’re less than one week away from our Mifos Initiative Launch Event in downtown San Francisco at Pivotal Labs on June 11 at 630pm. Paul Maritz has been eager to host an event to build consciousness of our initiative in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley so we’re excited to finally make it a reality!

Since we are bringing so many people together for this special event, we’re going to formally launch the Mifos Initiative and the latest release of the Mifos X platform. At the event we’ll be telling some of the amazing stories about the many individuals in our community who are the heart, soul, and brilliance that powers our initiative. Reuniting past supporters and invigorating a new set of contributors, we’ll kick off our Silicon Valley/Bay Area Mifos chapter. This group will be an active body of committed volunteers that is evangelizing our project to recruit new volunteers, bring on new financial supporters and form new partnerships to extend our platform and market reach.

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Edward Cable

A Light-hearted Look at our 2014 GSOC Interns

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At the start of the program, we gave you a quick look into the professional and academic backgrounds of our intern class. Now we want to take a more personal and lighthearted look into the lives of our interns. We’ve got an interesting class that comes from various backgrounds with some intriguing standout personalities – make sure you get the chance to know them over the summer.
Some common threads in their fun facts – several of them love to eat and one of them loves to drink – it even makes him more productive. They’re all drawn to our project because it’s so unique – not only do we have a technology stack that’s in-demand, we’ve got a diverse and active community that embraces its newcomers, and our social mission tops it all off nicely.
Edward Cable

Meet the 2014 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns

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gsoc-2014

It’s official. Coding for the 2014 Google Summer of Code has now begun. Once again we’re lucky to have a diverse and talented group of students interning with us this summer. This year we have seven interns from four different countries who will be working under the leadership of our mentors from six different countries.  They’ll be working on a wide spectrum of projects that range from the back-end platform to the front-end community app, on down to mobile apps used directly in the field. By the end of the summer, our community will benefit from a native Android app dedicated to making field staff more efficient, a mobile app for enabling Pay as you Go Solar Energy transactions, a vastly improved user experience for our community app, enhancements to our data migration tool, a batching API that will unlock performance improvements across the entire platform, as well as a powerful ad-hoc reporting tool and evolutions to the client impact portal to a production-ready release. Read more

Edward Cable

Mifos at LinuxFest Northwest

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This past month we had the chance to experience LinuxFest Northwest for the first time. Over the years, we’d heard many good things from Adam Monsen and Bill Wright had always stopped by our booth to invite us to come. Their unique northwest logo always captivated us and given it was directly in our backyard, we had no excuses not to intend when we were offered a free booth as a Community Supporter.

This year, Ollie and I hosted a booth in the Exhibitor Hall for two days and got to meet hundreds of potential new supporters and contributors. It turned out to be one of the most well-run conferences we’ve attended and we look forward to returning for many years to come – hopefully we’ll get Vishwas to speak next year!  It’s a shame it took us to the 15th year of LinuxFest Northwest to finally come but LinuxFest Northwest has clearly perfected their conference over all those years and should be proud of their efforts.

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