Edward Cable

Mifos selected as Runner-Up for Fintech for Good Award in 2018 Banking Technology Awards

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The Mifos Initiative is honored to have been chosen as the Highly Commended runner-up entrant for the Fintech for Good Award in the 2018 Banking Technology Awards led by Fintech Futures.

While Deutsche Bank took home the Fintech for Good Award for its CommunITy Hackathons, we are pleased to have the prestigious honor of being selected as the Highly Commended entry amongst finalists like , , , , , and Banco BNI Europa.

Thank you to Fintech Futures and Comms for Good for hosting the awards and this valuable recognition. We’re proud that the impact of our community and ecosystem got to be recognize on this grand fintech stage and look forward to this as a springboard to further strengthen Mifos/Fineract as a recognizble name for open source banking, digital financial services innovation, cloud-based core banking, and banking the underbanked.

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rbrown

Ways to Give

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As a non-profit organization, donations are key to our success. Whether it be time or money, the generosity of the Mifos community is what allows our initiative to be so successful and steadily work towards a world where everyone has access to basic financial services. Read about the different way you can contribute to Mifos this holiday season!

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Edward Cable

Mifos Keynotes Linux Foundation Open Source Summit Europe

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Mifos President/CEO, Edward Cable, had the honor and privilege of giving a keynote talk at the Open Source Summit Europe hosted by Linux Foundation in Edinburgh, Scotland. His talk titled, Open Source Banking: End Poverty One Line of Code at a Time, can be watched below.

The aim of our keynote was to show developers that they could directly use open source to advance a social good like ending poverty. Apart from motiving developers with our powerful social mission of 3 Billion Maries, we were able to use this massive forum to tell our story around Open Source Banking and the evolution of our community, ecosystem and technology stack culminating in Fineract CN and Financial Inclusion 2.0.  Showing our pioneering efforts in guiding the sector through its evolution from microfinance to digital financial services fit nicely into the conference’s theme of The Evolution of Open.

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My Google Code In Experience – Chirag Gupta

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With the start of Google Code In this Tuesday, we wanted to share the experience of Chirag Gupta, one of our Mifos community members and GCI participants who went on the trip to Google headquarters in San Francisco after being selected as one of the winners of last year’s Google Code In. Read his incredible story below:

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rbrown

2018 Google Summer of Code Reflections

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Hopefully you read our introduction to our 2018 Google Summer of Code interns. If you missed our official recap, take a look to discover what they worked on.  As is tradition, we always ask our our interns a few questions at the end of the summer to reflect back on their experiences and see how they’ve transformed over the summer. Here is what they had to say!

What was your most rewarding experience contributing to Mifos this summer?

Lalit – Learning about the architecture that has been working for smaller financial institutions without fancier servers and tooling. Understanding the importance of scorecards and analytics for banking and coming up with an approach that would help financial institutions to adopt analytics for better risk management.

Ruphine –  Most rewarding experience for me was the software engineering experience I gain by working on cloud native application. It has greatly improve my engineering skills. I also acquire some experience by working in a team and contributing to the community.

Pembe – The fact that I get to work with others and to be able to give account of my daily progress. Also to have mentors who are willing to help me explain the big picture and also to have domain experts which has helped improve my knowledge in terms of financing, working with microservices and improving my coding practices.

Abhay – Interacting with the community members and my mentors was the most rewarding experience for me this summer. I got an opportunity to not only work on the new revamped version of web-app improving my knowledge but also be a part of the decision making process and learn from everyone. I am really thankful to my mentors who always believed in me.

Ankit Interacting with the community members and my mentors was the most rewarding experience for me this summer. I got an opportunity to not only work on the new revamped version of web-app improving my knowledge but also be a part of the decision making process and learn from everyone. I am really thankful to my mentors who always believed in me.

Sanyam: The most rewarding experience for me was interacting with the Mifos Community and my mentors (Steve, Rahul, and Ed ) and also got the hands-on experience on a Fintech backend application and solving problems together and learned a lot in the whole process.

Courage – The most rewarding experience for me was actually working on the whole project. For a while now I have been so excited about cloud computing and with this project, I was opportune to not only work on a cloud-native project but also containerize the project for a production-ready environment and this has helped improve on my skills.

Dingfan – My most rewarding experience was learning about different aspect knowledge including technical and non-technical aspect. In the technical aspect, I learnt a lot about the architecture of Java programming. For example, I knew more about the steps to construct a project under the Spring framework pattern. In non-technical aspect, I learnt how to discuss with other people including peers and seniors.

Ebenezer – The most rewarding experience is the opportunity to build a new microservice from the ground up and to do so in an open source community. I am an open source enthusiast who believes in the potential of open source to help Africa leapfrog into technological advancement and prosperity. And so, I deem this a priceless experience;  to spearhead the development of this project within this conditions. Now, what made it even better is the sense of belonging to such an amazing open source community, and this is a dream come true.

Aksh – Most rewarding experience for me was to learn about the different architectures and how using a good architecture design can be really helpful in the long term for the project. My all personal projects before the summer were built to ‘just’ work, but now I can’t imagine writing a project without at least the MVP architecture.

Saksham – I got to interact with Rajan, Ed, other interns, and other community members, each interaction rewarded me in learning something new.

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Edward Cable

Mifos Conference Rundown

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One of our goals in 2018 was to be more active at conferences in getting the word out about the Mifos Initiative and the great work our community and ecosystem has been doing. To that end, we’ve had an active presence at a number of conferences this summer and a couple on their way this fall.

ApacheCon North America 2018

Next week I’ll be traveling to Montreal to give a talk at ApacheCon. Check out my separate post on ApacheCon to learn more about the Fineract Fintech track taking place on Tuesday.

Linux Foundation Open Source Summit Europe

In October, I’m going to cross over the pond to Edinburgh, UK to give a keynote at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe. My talk will highlight the massive need to bring financial services to the more than 3 Billion underbanked worldwide and how we can only do that through the game-changing OPEN approach we’ve pioneered that unites open source technology, supported by open community and sustained by open business models.

This will be an awesome chance to promote our initiative and community to the broader tech community in Europe. Thanks to Dave Neary for the introduction and to Angela Brown and Jillian Hall for making this happen.

 

OSCON

We returned to OSCON once again for the 8th time and as is tradition we hosted a booth in the Non Profit Pavilion under the sponsorship of O’Reilly. 

Our booth really helped us capture and experience how big of a fintech presence there was at the conference; as compared to years past, the financial services sector has really been starting to embrace open source.  We were able to tell the story of our ecosystem and the innovation its enabled on top of our open API to representatives of companies including Square, Paypal, American Express, MasterCard, Capital One, Royal Bank of Canada, Farm Credit, Decred, Thomson Reuters, IBM, HyperLedger, Sovrin Foundation, and more. Read more

Edward Cable

Fineract Fintech Track at ApacheCon North America 2018

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Next week ApacheCon descends upon Montreal – we’ll have a large contingent of our community in  attendance and Fineract will take center stage with PMC VP, Myrle Krantz, giving a keynote entitled Banking on Open Source.

I’ll be giving a similar version of the talk James Dailey and I delivered at OSCON, Open Banking: Fueling Innovation on an Open Source Core Banking Platform. In this talk, I’ll show firsthand what Open Source Banking truly is by presenting four enterprise case studies on Fineract adoption, implementation, and contribution at financial institutions ranging from fintechs to microfinance banks.

This is my first ApacheCon and I’m looking forward to it – for the chance to put faces to names for the many ASF members I’ve interacted with on the lists and to attend sessions to further immerse myself in the Apache Way.  

For any of the Mifos or Fineract community in North America, I’d highly recommend you try to make it the conference because Tuesday, Sept 25, will house the Fineract Fintech track. Thank you to Rich Bowen for making this dedicated track happen.

Myrle Krantz, Apache Fineract VP will kick things off with a keynote that morning entitled “Banking on Open Source”. Next up will be Rajan Maurya sharing his experiences as an intern on Branchless Banking and Promoting Financial Inclusion in the Fragile States.  My talk on Open Source Banking will then follow and later in the day, Gaurav Saini will speaking about building an Offline-First Expense Manager App with Apache CouchDB.  Daniel Ruggeri of Mastercard will be giving his talk, Bringing Enterprise into the Open Source World  that fits nicely into the theme as it chronicles Mastercard’s Open Source contribution journey.

A big thank you also to the Apache Travel Assistance Committee whose generous travel sponsorship is enabling Rajan Maurya, Kumaranath Fernando, and Sanyam Goel to travel all the way from India to attend.

Edward Cable

2018 Google Summer of Code Wrap-Up

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It seems like each year Google Summer of Code passes us by even more rapidly than the last year and this year it was no different We worked with another stellar class of interns, and once again grew our participation to our highest levels yet with 13 Mifos Initiative interns and 4 Apache Fineract interns. With the large intern class and taking on multiple projects on Fineract CN for the first time, this was our most challenging year to date. Our mentors were stretched to their limits and our interns did a great job producing impactful code on all fronts – on the mobile app front, we’ve significant enhanced our mobile field operations app and both our mobile banking app and mobile wallet app. We even built the first client-facing banking app on Fineract CN and evolved Fineract CN Mobile. On the web and front-end we made substantial progress in completely re-writing our Mifos X Web App onto Angular 6 and advanced our online banking app. On the Fineract back-end, we implemented much needed scalability enhancements, rolled out a robust architecture for our payment gateway, and explored new frontiers with scorecards for machine learning and a Mifos chatbot. Lastly on top of Fineract CN our Mifos intern enabled containerization via Docker and Kubernetes while the Apache Fineract interns implemented a new microservice for email and SMS and began implementing the first functionality for group lending and group management. This post will showcase the outstanding work they did with the community and part 2 of our official GSOC Wrap-up will focus on their reflections on their journey throughout Google Summer of Code.

Thank You!

Before we take a closer look at the results of the summer, we want to first off thank everyone who made Google Summer of Code another successful year.

Google Open Source Programs Office

First off we want to once again thank the Google Open Source Programs office for giving us the opportunity to participate once more in both Google Code-In and and Google Summer of Code. For our community, GSOC has really become a life-blood of our project. In our talk at LinuxFest Northwest, we documented how GSOC helps us organically grow our community year after year. While we unfortunately missed the GSOC meetup at OSCON, it was a pleasure seeing Stephanie, Mary, Josh and Helen at the GCI grand prize trip and we look forward to hopefully seeing Cat too at the Mentor Summit in October.  We are always impressed by the awesome job they do in coordinating such a massive global collaboration handling all the moving pieces so smoothly. We look forward to participating in GCI and GSOC for many years to come!

Mentors

A huge thank you to all our mentors who are the most critical piece of the puzzle in having a successful Google Summer of Code. Without our mentors being there at each step of the way to help guide our students in their journey, we couldn’t get through the summer. Some of our mentors really had to step up big time as a couple of our mentors had to step away due to unforeseen conflicts. We value this redundancy but need to grow our mentor participation for next year so are eager to welcome any community members who’d like to make the leap, to step forward now!

Thank you to our mobile development mentors – Rajan Maurya, Tarun Mudgal, Puneet Kohli, Naman Dwivedi, and Ishan who had some limited time to review code.  Thank you to our web development mentors – Gaurav Saini, Pranjal Goswami, Raunak Sett, and Mohit Bajoria.  Thanks to our mentors on the platform side – Avik Ganguly, Nayan Ambali, Aleksandar Vidakovic,  Steve Conrad, Rahul Goel, and Victor Romero. Thank you to our Fineract CN mentors – Yannick Awasum, Isaac Kamga, and Myrle Krantz. A big thank you to other community members and volunteers like Sundari Swami, Santosh Math, and Shruthi Rajaram.

Our Interns

Last, but certainly not least, thank you to our interns from across the globe who poured their energy into their projects. This year they were ever-perseverant in working on brand new codebases, changing requirements on the fly, and working on experimental solutions. What is always most rewarding is seeing how collaborative and supportive the interns are of each other helping to solve coding problems, helping with collaboration tools and just being great all-around community members. We wish them the best of luck in whatever they pursue next and look forward to their continued contributions to the Mifos Initiative. Already, despite the program being officially over, many of our interns have continued making contributions and wrapping up loose ends of their projects. 

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