Partner Spotlight: Kanopi

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Hello Mifos Community!

With the Mifos team traveling to Indonesia, we wanted to take the time to spotlight Kanopi, one of Mifos’s most productive partners.

Kanopi is based in Indonesia and has been actively involved in both deploying the Mifos platform as well as building new features on top of it. Specifically, Kanopi has developed prize-linked savings, social media notifications, and biometric authentication using the Mifos platform as their base.

kanopi-in-acxtionAn MFI agent shown on the right carries out a transaction using Kanopi’s fingerprint scanning device

The Jakarta Post has noticed how fintech is changing in Indonesia, and highlighted Kanopi as one of the innovators and was named one of the grand finalists of the Fintech Festival’s startup competition. The Digital News Asia featured Kanopi as sparking a microfinance revolution in Indonesia and pushing for financial inclusion.

To learn more about Kanopi, you can check out their presentation on our Youtube channel at Mifos Tech Days ‘16 where you can learn more about the great work that Kanopi is doing in Indonesia. You can also check out their website here.

We would like to thank Kanopi for actively contributing to Mifos and ultimately providing easier access to financial services in Indonesia.

-Jacob Kobzi, Business Development Intern

Mifos in Indonesia

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Hello Mifos Community!

This past week, the Indonesia Fintech Festival and Conference 2016 took place in Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia. The conference is a joint event between the Financial Services Authority (OJK) and the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin). Although the conference is based on fintech, there was a special focus on Financial Inclusion this year, as technology continues to transform Financial Inclusion.

The conference was two days and covered topics including “Improving Financial Inclusion Through Fintech”, “Accelerate Financial Sector With Fintech”, “Digital Currencies”, and many more.

Mifos had an exciting presence at the Indonesia Fintech Festival and Conference this year.

Steven Hodgson, Director of Kanopi, was present at the conference. Kanopi has been a partner with Mifos for a long time and is working on deploying the Mifos platform within Indonesia.

Mifos was also present through BTPN. BTPN is a financial institution in Indonesia that has been using Mifos since we were a project with the Grameen Foundation (roughly 5 years ago). They are still using Mifos and have around 2 million clients processing around 630,000 transactions per day.

In a country with significant mobile adoption and devotion to financial technology, there is a great opportunity to reach the unbanked. It’s amazing to see the Mifos community come together like it has in Indonesia, joining partners, financial institutions, and ordinary people together to promote Financial Inclusion for everybody.

 
-Jacob Kobzi, Business Development Intern

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.

 

 

Financial Inclusion Newsflash – April

/0 Comments/in /by

A roundup of some of the notable news in the financial inclusion, fin-tech, mobile money, and open source circles:

Making Progress Towards 3 Billion Maries

World Bank has released the results of the latest Global Findex data and progress is being made. The Center for Financial Inclusion has nicely recapped the report on their blog: The number of unbanked individuals has dropped from 2.5 billion to 2 billion as account penetration increased by about 20 percent or 700 million adults, bringing the world’s banked rate from 51 to 62 percent. India and China account for most of this jump in financial inclusion but 43% of “banked” Indians hadn’t made a deposit or withdrawal in the past twelve months.

The data also confirms the growth and penetration of mobile money in sub-Saharan Africa where 12% of adults (versus 2 percent globally) have a mobile money account. 45% of these mobile money account holders rely on it alone for formal banking which is promising for the potential of digital financial inclusion in other regions. We are delighted to see the overall growth in universal access and optimistic that adoption and true inclusion will be brought about through the transition to digital financial inclusion. We are eager for the Mifos X platform to be a part of that shift by serving as a common technology foundation for others to innovate from.

You can read the full report at The Global Findex Database 2014: Measuring Financial Inclusion Around the World and also download the data itself to analyze and visualize it.

Read more