Announcing Mifos X 15.03: Mandatory Savings, Individual Collection Sheets, OAuth 2 Support, Context-Sensitive Help

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On April 06, 2015 we shipped our first major release for 2015, Mifos X 15.03. With the release, we’ve adopted the new release numbering framework identified by the year-month of the date of the scheduled release. Mifos X 15.03 contained a great deal of new technical and security enhancements, functional improvements to the loans and accounting module, as well as some improved usability. OAuth 2 Support as well as stricter password configuration policies will provide more robust authentication mechanisms. Bulk Collection Sheet Entry for Individual Loans as well as Mandatory Savings accounts are not supported. The loans module now allows for fixed loan product parameters, configurable working days, multiple options for interest calculation on pre-closure, greater flexibility during the approval and disbursal process for multi-tranche loans, and improved rounding off rules for EMI repayments. For the accounting module, one can now migrate opening balances as well as configure fees to be mapped to liability accounts. Last but not least, Mifos X 15.03 now has a significant amount of context-sensitive help including tooltips and dynamic help menu links.  Please view the Mifos X 15.03 release notes for full details.

UPDATE: On May 18, 2015, we shipped the first service pack or hotfix release, Mifos 15.03.1. This released contained new functionality such as a loan products that support a compounding period that is independent from the rest frequency period, improved filtering and searchability on client/groups/center listings, and nearly three dozen bug fixes and UI enhancements. Please view the Mifos X 15.03.1 release notes for full details.

Many thanks go out to all the contributors who made this release possible – especially our core team, partners like Conflux Technologies and Musoni Services, as well as a number of new features that were worked on the high school students who participated in our Google Code-In projects.

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2015 Mifos Community Choice Awards – Honoring our Finest

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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

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Vishwas Babu – Winner of the 2015 Pizzigati Prize

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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

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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.
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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

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Announcing Mifos X 1.26: Improved Guarantor Management, Teller Cash Management, Configurable Account Prefixes and more

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Just in time for the new year, we shipped the latest release, Mifos X 1.26.0, on December 23 which provides a range of new functionalities across our suite of lending and savings products as well as a number of usability enhancements and bug fixes. Major new features include support for capturing guarantee requirements for loans and blocking/holding funds on guarantor accounts, a beta version of our teller cash management module, new statuses for client life cycle, the ability to map liability accounts to fees, ability to update deposit amounts for active recurring deposits, support for capture client images from a linked webcam, and functionality to configure account prefixes on client, loan and savings accounts. With the range of bug fixes and UI enhancements, there are more than 75 tickets fixed in this release. Download Mifos X 1.26 now or request a trial instance to try it out for your organization. Read more

Star Contributor of the Month – Terence Monteiro

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terence-nymtrsWe’re recognizing Terence Monteiro of San Jose Solutions from Bangalore as our Star Contributor. Terence has only been a part of our community since late June but he’s exactly what we look for in a partner – an amazingly talented contributor who lights up our community with his passion for our social mission. He’s eager to share his talents and give back to the community in all ways. Listening to him talk, you can hear the genuine enthusiasm he has and the conviction with which he carries out his work. Join us in congratulating Terence who has many good things to come including more successful deployments and innovation for the community. 
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Introducing the Mifos Partner Council

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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

Banking Reinvented – Open, Cloud & Mobile

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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.

 

Announcing Mifos X 1.25: WebHooks, Accrual Accounting, Declining Balance with Interest Recalculation

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The core team and community have been hard at work at continuing to broaden the functionality of Mifos X and make the platform more extensible for our ecosystem of partners. This release delivers on some must-have financial and accounting features with support for perodic accrual accounting with point-in-time accruals, true declining balance with interest recalculation with support for configurable rest periods and compounding settings, the ability to pre-pay loans, bulk JLG loan applications, and a whole range of usability enhancements.  On the architectural side, we’ve built out a WebHooks framework with a proof-of-concept Twilio SMS integration, shipped our Batch APIs for improved performance, and an Executable WAR for quick installation of Mifos X. Download Mifos X 1.25 now or request a trial instance to try it out for your organization. Read more

Talking about Financial Inclusion to Financial Innovators at FinDEVr

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James Dailey, board member and Chief Innovation Officer for the Mifos Initiative, spent this week at FinDEVr San Francisco with Vishwas introducing the Mifos X platform to the world of fin-tech innovators. 
This week was terrific. I was able to geek out about financial inclusion for hours, give a presentation about the powerful Platform that the Mifos team has built, learn what other tech is up and coming, and share the narrative of why Mifos as a rallying concept – open source, open APIs, cloud, mobile – is so important for building the financial services that people everywhere deserve.
The FinDEVr conference at UC San Francisco Conference Center was not the typical conference for Mifos. Attendees were representing some of the largest payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal) and their development efforts were focused on use cases that are quite removed from the world of microfinance or building the basic payment networks in emerging markets.

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