Mifos, SACCOs and Credit Unions

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Mifos, SACCOs and Credit Unions

The Perfect Marriage

If ever two movements were meant to work together, it is the credit union movement and the Mifos initiative.  We have a shared mission to end poverty, we have shared principals, member control, independence and cooperative methodologies. Together we can accomplish a lot.

The Mifos Initiative was honored to host a webinar “Transforming Financial Inclusion: Mifos, SACCOs & Credit Unions” attended by 130 financial inclusion influencers, developers, volunteers and financial institutions – all focused on the same mission – bringing financial services to the 3 billion unbanked in the world.  Cooperative growth and the strong alignment between Mifos & Credit Unions was the main theme of the presentation.

From its very origin, the credit union community has been dedicated to helping one another grow since its German beginnings in the mid 1800s.  Picture1Because of people wanting to help people by pooling their money to make small loans, the credit union movement was born.  Through a spirit of cooperation, credit unions rapidly spread throughout Europe, India, North America, South America, Africa and the rest of the world.

The Mifos platform began with similar humble roots in microfinance providing a free and open source lending platform to reach the unbanked.  Because of people wanting to help people gain effective and afformifos-tag-transparentdable technology, the Mifos Initiative was born.  Today Mifos X has extended its reach to all types of financial service providers – Cooperatives, SACCOs, Credit Unions, Banks and even runs as the core system for sophisticated financial delivery systems.

Today the unserved are in emerging markets around the globe.  These markets are all about digital financial services.  We are witnessing considerable growth in in digital payments, in remittances, and in mobile money.  To be a modern financial institution – even in the most remote parts of the world – we need to have a modern connected core banking system.  Obviously this needs to be VERY inexpensive.  Mifos X being free and open source is that system.

Mifos technology is the future of financial services.  Everyone is moving into this brave new world of digital, cloud based service delivery; when you adopt  Mifos, you will be miles ahead and ready for the challenges of tomorrow.

Take some time to look at the recorded webinar and see how – together – we make impactful change.

 

 

2015 Mifos Community Choice Awards – Honoring our Finest

/0 Comments/in , /by

Throughout the year, so many acts of kindness, ingenuity, and dedication go unheralded. Now in their second year, we formally recognize those community members who through the leadership and service to the project, serve as shining examples to the entire ecosystem of how we can each do our collective part to create a world of 3 Billion Maries. The post below recaps our Community Choice Awards  dinner which took place on March 12, 2015 at during our Global Summit in Sharjah. Over a fine dinner and some impromptu entertainment led by Amit Jain, we honored our finest community members:

  • Most Innovative MFI (sponsored by Google): Elevate Africa
  • Most Dedicated Platform Solution Partner: Musoni Services
  • Most Dedicated Deployment Partner (sponsored by ThoughtWorks): Intrasoft Technologies
  • Technical Volunteer of the Year (sponsored by Liberty Mutual) –  Markus Geiss
  • Non-Technical Volunteer of the Year – Dayna Harp
  • Distinguished Service Award –  Nayan Ambali

Read more

Star Contributor of the Month – Ishan Khanna

/0 Comments/in , , /by

 

Meet Our Star Contributor for March 2015 – Ishan Khanna

Ishan entered The Mifos Community as a Google Summer of Code 2014 participant where he grabbed hold of Android Client and built out the native Android field operations app for Mifos X users. Over the course of last summer, Ishan took the community from no mobile app to full functionality. His work can be seen in the Mifos Android Client User Guide.

IK SummitIshan didn’t stop there. He has been active in the Community ever since – even though he has a full-time job with SeekSherpa. He has contributed major bug fixes and engaged others in the community. During the 2015 Summit, he made contributions to several partners including FINA in Georgia to help get their remote app to full functionality. Tengiz Merabishvili from FINA says, “Ishan helped us a bunch, he is a great developer. He is very energetic and knowledgeable. He is a hard worker and once he sets his mind to do something, he always gets it done. I enjoyed our brief time working together, and learned a lot.”

In Ishan’s own words, “I am an insatiable geek, striving for perfection in software.  I love giving Tech Talks and motivating people about FOSS Development.” He has two and one-half years Android Platform experience. He has a gained good grip on Java, Android SDK, Git, Gradle and other related technologies in this period.

Q.  On what projects are you currently working?

A.  I’m working on an app that will allow travellers to connect with locals and change the way travellers see a city these days. TL;DR – Disrupting the Conventional Travel Experience.

 Q.   What is most rewarding about working with the Mifos Community?

A.  The opportunity to meet, work with and learn from people in Global Mifos Summit, having experience in the industry more than my total living age. And to represent Mifos Initiative at Google Summer of Code Reunion in San Jose, California in October, 2014.

 Q.  How do you play when you aren’t working?

India Love in DubaiA.  When I am not working I am usually digging into new frameworks, languages and tech blogs. Find food across the world through YouTube. Or watching “The Big Bang Theory”.

Perhaps painting his face in support of India while in Dubai slipped his mind. . .

Thanks Ishan for your contributions and your joyful spirit!

The Roots of The Mifos Initiative

/0 Comments/in /by

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

How the Silk Road turns into a path to meet Friends

/0 Comments/in /by

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?

IMG_7867

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

Global Mifos Summit Wrap-Ups

/0 Comments/in /by

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.

Vishwas Babu – Winner of the 2015 Pizzigati Prize

/1 Comment/in , /by

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

100 Million Project: Our Commitment to Social Performance Management

/0 Comments/in , /by
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.
100_Million_Project_logo_720x236
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

You Asked, We’ve Listened

/0 Comments/in , /by

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.

Introducing the Mifos Partner Council

/0 Comments/in , /by

When we launched the new Mifos Initiative, one of our biggest goals was to give the community more ownership and accountability for the direction of the platform and growth of the community. It’s my pleasure to formally introduce our Mifos Partner Council, a formal advisory council to the Mifos Initiative staff and board.

Comprised of members of the Mifos Partner community, its role is to provide recommendations for creating a sustainable Mifos user community by building a better Mifos platform and a stronger partner community. Specifically, the Partner Council is intended to provide input in areas including, but not limited to the following areas documented in the Partner Council Terms of Reference: Read more