Video from James Dailey’s talk at FinDEVr is now live. Watch his invigorating talk on using the Mifos X open technology platform to bring financial services to the 4 Billion underbanked worldwide. We’re helping financial innovators deliver banking as a service in the cloud and via mobile devices. For full details, see our page on the Finovate website and James’ blog from the event.
We are proud to take the stage as a bronze sponsor at FinDEVr San Francisco this week. Billed as the First Event for Fintech Developers, we’re eager to showcase our game-changing Mifos X platform to the world’s leading players in the fintech space like MasterCard, Visa, and Paypal. Organized by the Finovate Group, “for the first time, FinDEVr will gather together hundreds of the builders – devs, software architects, CTOs, VPs of engineering – that are forging the future of financial, banking and payments technology in a single place.”
We are excited to open their eyes, likely for the first time as well, to the massive opportunity there is to bring financial service to the 2.5 Billlion Unbanked at the Base of the Pyramid. James Dailey will be on the main stage on Day 1 to give a talk introducing our Mifos X platform, and the innovative new business models that our a modern componentized API-driven architecture enables. As the world’s one true open platform for financial inclusion, we give innovators the power to build mobile and cloud-based solutions that scale and respond directly to the rapidly evolving needs of clients worldwide.
I am honored and excited to join the Mifos team as the Director of Strategic Initiatives. The primary charge of this position is to assist the Mifos Community to deliver on its mission to speed the elimination of poverty by coordinating a global community that uses Mifos X to deliver responsible financial services to the world’s 2.5 billion poor and unbanked. To help achieve this mission, I will reach out to the global financial co-operatives for support, will coordinate the efforts of end user documentation and will coordinate the volunteer efforts of non-technical volunteers.
We’re excited to be hosting our third annual summit and coming to Africa for the first time. Raj Jain and the team at Yako Microfinance will welcome us to Kampala, Uganda for our annual gathering to unite our community across the world who are using, supporting, and building the Mifos X platform to advance technology-enabled financial inclusion. Once again our summit will be four days long from October 14 to October 17.
Apart from the opportunity to network and connect with fellow community members, this year will have an even larger focus on hands-on training for partners and users, collaborative tech sessions for contributors, & educational sessions led by external experts from the fin-tech & financial inclusion sector.
As we look to stimulate and grow our East African community, one entire day of the summit will be focused on building awareness of Mifos X for the local East Africa region including an Expo Hall for our partners to showcase their solutions to local and regional financial institutions.
It’s become an annual tradition for our Mifos team to gather in Portland for a week of reaching out to new contributors and immersing ourselves in the latest in open source technology and communities at OSCON. This year we had a busy week with the Community Leadership Summit, our quarterly Mifos Initiative board meeting, an exhibition booth in the non-profit pavilion and a speaking slot on the Business and Javascript tracks at OSCON.
Once again throughout the hallways and in our conference booth, our initiative was very well-received. In general, the sector is familiar with microfinance and their curiosity is piqued when they discover our initiative, an open source platform for delivering financial services to the poor. This year I noted a larger presence of financial services people more heavily involved in open source, including regulators, payments providers, and those involved in alternative currencies like Bitcoin. We are interested in bringing to bear their skills in both open source technology and financial services.
We’re right in the middle of OSCON and having a blast, meeting some incredibly motivated and talented individuals. After the conference, we’re looking to turn them into great volunteers for our community.
We have one more day at our booth in the Expo Hall tomorrow and have Vishwas Babu’s talk, Bringing Banking to the Poor with the Help of AngularJS at 11:30am, Wednesday July 23, in room D137/D138
We are excited for Vishwas to take the stage at OSCON and for others in the open source community to see how strong a leader he is.
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
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.
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.