Edward Cable

Google Summer of Code 2018 – End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.

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gsoc2016-sun-373x373This summer you’ll have the ability to change lives – three billion of them – one line of code at a time. The Mifos Initiative will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the seventh time. You’ll have the have the chance to build web and mobile apps for digital financial services or contribute to our award-winning Mifos X open source technology platform powered by Apache Fineract or brand new Apache Fineract CN application framework for digital financial services. Google Summer of Code is a global program sponsored by Google that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects.  Students accepted to the program will spend their summers coding from May 14th to August 14th and upon successful evaluation, receive a stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline – student applications are open from March 12  now through March 27! You can apply from our organization page.

Want to learn more? Browse our ideas page for projects and links to all our code repositories.  Click below to view the screencast from our Ask Me Anything held on Thursday March 15 at 1200GMT.

View the Screencast from our Google Summer of Code AMA

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Edward Cable

2017 Mifos Google Code-In Wrapup

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It’s now time for our official wrap-up blog post for the 2017 Google Code-In, our third year of participation. This year’s program was so fast-paced and frenetic that I’ve needed to catch my breath before recapping. Coming up for air and reviewing all the completed tasks, I’m blown away by how much our students were able to get done and how valuable their work is for our community. As a whole across the entire program, participation in Google Code-In from pre-university students, grew by 265% versus last year with 3555 students from 78 countries completing 16,468 tasks. For the Mifos Initiative, individually, our growth was even greater with participation growing by 362% with 123 students completing 458 tasks, nearly three times as many as the 159 that were completed in the competition last year. A huge thank you to all of our mentors, many of them former GSOC students and even some former GCI participants for helping us handle this huge volume of contribution.

We’ll  do two blog posts to commemorate the awesome energy and passion for open source that we have catalyzed in these students. Today’s post will highlight the impressive contributions that were made across all five categories – code, documentation, QA, user interface, and outreach/research while our second one will give a closer personal look at our top five finalists – grand prize winners, Chirag Gupta with 66 tasks completed and Matthew Katz, and remaining finalists Janice Kim,  Muhammad Rafly Andrianza, and  Shivam Kumar Singh.

The level of detail and commitment to these tasks demonstrated by not just our grand prize finalists but our top fifteen students was astounding. They contributed numerous code fixes to the platform, our web and mobile apps including completion of all the remaining work for our Swagger API documentation. Some great bug reports and a helpful guide on submitting a good report came through on the QA front. On the UI/UX side, a number of nice mockups for our mobile and web apps were shared as well as beautiful designs for t-shirts, logos, and graphics that we’ve already been using in our marketing communications. We received strong contributions to improve our technical and user-facing documentation including detailed tutorial videos. Lastly, the students worked on incredibly thorough and detailed research including profiles on innovation labs, financial inclusion landscape studies, libraries of creative common images, catalogs of events and conferences to attend, FAQs and research briefs on topics like chatbots, competitive analysis, and more.

For all of this exemplary work, we’re trying to put it in practice and share it with the broader community so stay tuned to the code being shipped, seeing your design get implemented, reading your research on our wiki, or watching your video tutorial. A tremendous thank you to all 123 students that completed a task – your work is greatly valued and you futures are extremely bright!

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Edward Cable

Mifos Welcomes Fintech Advisor, Vincent Alimi

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The Mifos Initiative is glad to announce the addition of a new member to its team of business and technical advisors. Vincent Alimi will bring 15 years of experience in the fintech space and in mobile payments in particular. Mifos will benefit from Vincent’s expertise and experience on various topics such as product strategy and sustainability. He will also be involved in various strategic growth projects and partner relationship management.

Since 2003, focusing on mobile services and their security, Vincent has benefitted from working at the forefront of mobile payments at a time when the technology was in its infancy. In 2012, he earned a Ph.D. in Digital Payments from the University of Caen, France. Vincent joined Mobeewave in 2013, a company known for offering the next big thing in payment acceptance. He has held key technical and non-technical roles throughout his time there, and today is their Chief Growth Officer.”

“I’m looking forward to working closely with Vincent in growing our global ecosystem and strengthening the long term sustainability of our initiative,” said Edward Cable, President/CEO. “Vincent’s passion for financial inclusion and visionary insight into the latest fintech trends will help us position ourselves more prominently as a leader in digital financial services. His deep experience across the entire fintech spectrum from serving as an architect all the way up to a business development executive, will allow us to target strategic partnerships to augment our global reach and help shape our product roadmap to respond to the evolving needs of the sector.”

Edward Cable

Star Contributor of the Month – Sanyam Goel

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We are recognizing Sanyam Goel, our recent 2017 GSOC intern who worked on implementing all of the Fineract APIs into Swagger Open API format, as our latest Star Contributor of the Month. Sanyam took on this highly complex project with ease during the summer and then during Google Code-In worked extensively with our participants as a mentor to wrap the remaining Swagger work as well as mentor other tasks related to documentation and research. All in all, he helped to review or give feedback on nearly 60 tasks. Join us in recognizing Sanyam for his hard work as a GSOC intern, GCI mentor, and contributor the Fineract and Mifos communities for many years to come.
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Edward Cable

Webinar: Introduction to Mojaloop from the Gates Foundation

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We’re pleased to have Matt Bohan and other members of the Gates Foundation lead a webinar giving an introduction and Q & A session on the recently released Mojaloop.
The webinar was held on Wednesday January 10 at 1500GMT via GoToTraining.

Mojaloop is “open-source software for building interoperable digital payments platforms on a national scale. It makes it easy for different kinds of providers to link up their services and deploy low-cost financial services in new markets.”

At the Mifos Initiative, we believe that Mojaloop nicely complements the Mifos/Apache Fineract stack whereby we provide the core banking infrastructure for client and mobile wallet account management, a financial ledger, and portfolio account management needed by each Digital Financial Service Provider to uniquely identify accounts and initiate and record transactions on financial accounts.

While Mojaloop provides an open source platform enabling an internet of payments providing secure, low-cost, interoperable payments utilizing the following components:

Mojaloop includes four components: an interoperability layer, which connects bank accounts, mobile money wallets, and merchants in an open loop; a directory service layer, which navigates the different methods that providers use to identify accounts on each side of a transaction; a transactions settlement layer, which makes payments instant and irrevocable; and, components which protect against fraud.

To learn more about Mojaloop read the press release, view the FAQ, browse the repo and of course attend the webinar!

We look forward to being an active part of the Mojaloop community and are working on some proof of concept integrations between Mojaloop and Fineract 1.0 and Fineract CN.

Edward Cable

Open Source from the Eyes of a GCI Student

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This guest blog post is from Matt, one of our 2017-2018 Google Code-In participants. He penned this impressive piece for one of the tasks he claimed, “Write a blog post on why open source is valuable”.

Open source software is vitally important to the world of computer science and technology in general as it allows for many beneficial things to happen that are simply not possible with proprietary code and non open source code.

Firstly, open source benefits students and anyone interested in coding or technology as through this valuable resource they are easily able to study sample code and learn. If there were no open source software it would be much harder for them to learn well and get a good understanding of what coding looks like in practice. If young people learn how to code well they can apply that knowledge later on to help benefit all facets of society. It will not only benefit society but also the workforce as there will be more talent on the market meaning that companies should have the incentive to create more open source material as that is a way they could be investing in future talent. One last note on the economic side that is very important is the fact that since open source software is not made for profit and is usually free it allows for many people who cannot afford to experience technology to its fullest due to
financial issues to not only use it but also learn how it works. Read more

Edward Cable

2017 Google Code-In is Underway

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The Mifos Initiative once again has the honor of participating in Google Code-In, a fast-paced six-week long immersion of high school students into open source. For these pre-university students, our community provides a unique opportunity to learn about all aspects of open source collaboration, open source code development, and open source community all while helping to end poverty one line of code at a time.

For us, it’s a meaningful way to share the expertise of our community and our mentors in opening the eager eyes of these students to the many ways to contribute to open source in a technical and non-technical fashion. Since we work with so many new contributors coming in, it’s also a great way for us to improve all the points of entry to our community and have students participate in this as well. Google Code-In catalyzes a cycle creating new contributors and helps us cultivate our community to continue to grow organically.

Thank you to the hard work of all our mentors so far. So many of our past students have really been paying it forward to the next generation of contributors!

Impact Thus Far

We’re only 2 weeks into the program but we’ve already nearly surpassed the total number of tasks completed last year. In 2016 we worked with 34 students who completed 159 tasks. Just 14 days into this year’s program, we have worked with 100 students who’ve completed 141 tasks.  

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Edward Cable

Star Contributor of the Month – Dilpreet Singh

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We are recognizing Dilpreet Singh, our recent 2017 GSOC intern who worked on our mobile banking app, as our latest Star Contributor of the Month. Dilpreet has become an anchor in our community of mobile developers starting with the exemplary he work during GSOC in which he went above and beyond the requirements of his project. Since GSOC has concluded, despite a busy schedule with university, Dilpreet has continued to actively work on our mobile banking app and we look forward to his presence and leadership in helping to guide continued innovation on our mobile banking apps and more across the community.
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Edward Cable

Partner Spotlight – Intrasoft Technologies

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In this month’s Partner Spotlight we are featuring Intrasoft Technologies.  Intrasoft Technologies has been an active partner in the Mifos community since Generation 1 of our software. Zayyad and his team provide tireless support to more than a dozen organizations throughout Kenya. Zayyad was recently added as an Apache Fineract commmitter as he’s always sharing requirements with the community and helping us keep pace with the latest innovation in East Africa. He’s out there on the ground championing Mifos as well, helping us build our local chapter and host regional meetings. 

This regular blog series will shine the light on some of our top Partners. Not only do we want to recognize them for their accomplishments, we want others to learn from the approach they’ve taken to promote and implement Mifos.

Mifos Partners are one of the most crucial links in our community – they are the driving force that is promoting and supporting Mifos worldwide.  Aside from championing our product and bringing the Mifos technology to new markets, they act as the fundamental bridge feeding in MFI requirements to be developed by the community. Partners don’t stop there as many are also developing and localizing the product to fit their local market.  For all these reasons, we focus our full energy on making Partners successful – they are the primary channel to market, the eyes and ears on the ground, and the entrepreneurial force that will help us sustainably scale. We’d love to recognize your partner organization in this monthly spotlight so please reach out if you’d like to be featured.

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Edward Cable

Financial Inclusion Week 2017 – Fueling Open Innovation on top of the Digital Rails

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This past week we had the honor of being one of the more than sixty organizations participating in Financial Inclusion Week, a week of global conversation convened by the Center for Financial Inclusion on the most important steps to advance financial inclusion.

The Mifos Initiative hosted a webinar on November 3 titled Fueling Open Innovation on top of the Digital Rails. We were able to share our story as an open source pioneer and the stories of our innovators with more than 50 attendees, leaving them with tangible ways for them to innovate on top of our open source platforms.

As financial inclusion and the banking sector at large now just start to move towards “open banking,” we wanted to chronicle the journey we’ve been on the past decade as a pioneer of open source platforms for microfinance, financial inclusion, and now digital financial services.  The most impactful way to tell this story was to put our ecosystem on center stage. From fintech startups to financial institutions serving millions, our vibrant partner ecosystem has been able to focus on customer-facing innovation by building apps and not banking infrastructure. To make these lessons actionable and guide financial inclusion providers, banks, and fintech companies on their own journey to open innovation, we showcased our suite of mobile and web apps on top of our platform along with our forthcoming Generation 3 architecture Mifos I/O, soon to be released as Apache Fineract CN.

The most lasting takeway from the event was the chance to hear firsthand from our community on how they were able to use Mifos X and the Apache Fineract platform to dramatically accelerate the rollout of innovative digital financial services. Both Fiinlab of Gentera and RuPie were able to leverage a common technology platform and an open transparent community to focus on unique innovation for their customers.

View the webinar or the slides in their entirety.

With SAP, in order to get to market with new functionality it took over a year. With Mifos, we were able to shorten development cycles to where we were releasing new functionalities each week. It was a complete difference to be working with Mifos than what we were doing with SAP. That’s because Mifos is really flexible and has such a strong API that were able to do it faster than on SAP.

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