Mifos Events Round-Up

This summer has been a busy one as Mifos team members have travelled around the country educating various sectors on the powerful opportunity to eliminate global poverty through open source technology solutions for financial inclusion. While the audiences have been diverse, ranging from open source developers to credit union executives to FinTech innovators, the message is the same: join our global collaborative community and help us in our mission to bring financial services to the 2 Billion Unbanked.

We wanted to take a quick look back at the conferences we’ve been at and a couple more we’ll be speaking at this upcoming month.

• SOCAP 15 – San Francisco, CA (coming up!)
• FinDEVr SF 2015 – San Francisco, CA (coming up!)
• SpringOne2GX – Washington, DC
• FinovateFall 2015 – NYC, NY
• 2015 World Credit Union Conference – Denver, CO
• OSCON 2015 – Portland, OR

SOCAP 15

We’re honored to be a part of SOCAP15, the world’s foremost gathering of social innovators. SOCAP15 will convene leading impact investors, world-class entrepreneurs, and innovative cross-sector practitioners on October 6-9 in San Francisco for three full days of networking and engaging content at the intersection of money and meaning. Craig Chelius will be giving a Ted-Style talk on the SOCAPTV stage entitled Building the Bank of the Future to Reach the Unbanked.

We’ll be taking the stage Wed Oct 7 from 2:30 to 3:30pm PT so please stop by and watch if you’re at SOCAP or stay tuned for the recording. This will be our first time attending the full event so we look forward to meeting with all the budding FinTech entrepreneurs and immersing ourselves in the impact investing space.

FinDEVr SF 2015

FinDEVr is the premier event for FinTech Developers. We are excited to take the stage for the second year in a row as a presenter. The focus of FinDEVr is onbuilders (i.e. developers, software architects, CTOs and other builders) forging the future of financial, banking & payments technology. There is no other event devoted to these technologists and the special challenges they face in reshaping one of the most important industries in the world.

Craig Chelius and Markus Geiss will introduce the next generation of the Mifos platform which will help to catalyze a new wave of digital financial service applications. We’ll be presentingfrom 4:00 to 4:30pm on Tuesday Oct 6.

FinovateFall 2015

Craig Chelius attended FinovateFall 2015 in New York City from September 16 to 17. Seeking to become a more disruptive force in the FinTech sector with our cloud and mobile-ready financial inclusion solutions, we are immersing ourselves in the space. The conference brought together innovators at the forefront of banking and financial technology. The field is flush with mobile wallet providers, payments processors and those looking to leverage big data for a more secure, intelligent, and responsive banking experience. We’re eager to educate them on the massive opportunity to pioneer innovative ways to serve the base of the Pyramid.

SpringOne2GX

As Markus Geiss dives into building the next evolution of Mifos software for digital financial inclusion, he attended SpringOne2GX in Washington DC from September 14 to 17. He had the chance to meet with leaders in the Spring community and educate himself on the latest advances in the Spring IO Projects. Spring Framework and the other open source components are at the heart of our Mifos X platform so we’re eager to prepare ourselves to leverage the most recent and cutting edge technologies. The conference confirmed that we’re on the right path and with the same leading technologies that enterprise businesses use to power their mission-critical applications. Stay tuned for a wrap-up from Markus who just returned to Germany from DC. 

2015 World Credit Union Conference

Throughout this past year as co-ops, SACCOs, and credit unions around the world have begun to adopt Mifos X, momentum has built towards our participation at the annual World Credit Union Conference. Dayna Harp, Craig Chelius and our gracious volunteer, Bev Maxim, hosted our booth in the Expo Hall that was busily attended by the impressive array of delegations from around the world who all came together in the spirit of the cooperative movement. Our affordable solution and our global collaborative community were a big hit and exactly what people were looking for. We met with so many credit unions and SACCOs from Sub-Saharan Africa who were pleased with Mifos X and the alignment between our community and the cooperative principles.
We’ve already hosted a follow-on webinar and are actively following up with all the contacts we made. We’re excited for the potential collaboration in store with WOCCU, CCA, Malawi.

OSCON 2015

Ed Cable and Andrew Mottet represented the Mifos Initiative in the NonProfit Pavilion at OSCON for our fifth year at the nation’s premier open source gathering.

Once again we were able to meet with a cross-section of new and old faces from various industries who were all deeply motivated by our mission and eager to be a part of our community. Super-heroes were the theme and it aligned perfectly with our mission to fight poverty with financial inclusion.

We had the pleasure of announcing our membership in the Open Source Initiative with Patrick from OSI gladly promoting us from across the aisle. It was nice to connect with members of our board like Zaheda Bhorat, long-time friends and collaborators like Celine Takatsuno from Social Coding 4 Good, Bradley Kuhn from Software Freedom Conservancy, Bill Wright from LinuxFest Northwest and Michael Downey from OpenMRS. Reconnecting with the Google Open Source Programs team and Marina from Outreachy will help us continue to steward in a new generation of interns and student coders. The FinTech presence at OSCON continues to grow; it was nice to meet with folks from PayPal, iATS and our booth neighbor, Vanessa Gennarelli from Stellar. We met up with Ross Gardler and a number of new but motivated individuals at Microsoft so are excited for deeper collaboration with Microsoft on the heels of the community Dev Ops work they had sponsored.

Once again thank you to O’Reilly and staff like Michael Iritz for providing us a booth and the opportunity to get our project in front of the best and brightest in the open source world.