Innovative solutions by Fiter using Mifos/Fineract

With presence in over 20 countries, Fiter is the global leader in Fineract and Mifos implementations, customization and support. Some of Fiter’s most exemplary implementations include:

• Revolving credit for Nexa
• Credit scoring for Friendship Bridge
• Wallet account products for VFD
• Accrual accounting for liability products for VFD
• Buy now Pay Later loans for Oxygen 
• Keycloak integration for One Acre Fund
• Pentaho reports Postgres support for Oxygen
• Data migration using Apache Nifi for Inkomoko
• Regulatory report development for VFD Ghana

Common implementation challenges:

Projects are as versatile and dynamic as the environment they are created to support. Here are some common challenges which may arise during implementation:

It is not uncommon for the evolving business environment to affect project requirements. While the project requirements are determined before the project begins, changing market trends may create additional needs during implementation, leading to editing of the project requirements.

With any project, proper documentation and descriptions of the requirements is the basis to start off on the right foot. When documentation is lacking, this presents a challenge to the seamless implementation of the project.

Some issues arise from positive developments, but they too need to be handled properly. In cases where the business experiences rapid growth beyond its original projections, the existing infrastructure and system are under immense pressure.

Solutions to implementation challenges

Fiter is a practitioner of the Agile methodology and principles. This has prepared Fiter for any missing details in documentation and any changes to requirements. The Agile methodology values working software over documentation and anticipates changes mid-project.

Fiter has made significant changes to the core of the system to respond to sudden business growth. These adaptations include increasing transaction processing speed by creating a special product type (wallet), introducing asynchronous processing to eliminate record lock failures, introducing a read only replica database to handle read operations, implementing autoscaling, and the queuing of report generation.

And let’s not forget those heavy, ginormous reports that can never load or run without crashing the entire system. By incorporating mysql heatwave, these reports can now run within the shortest possible time and without straining the system.

Post-project support and training by Fiter

At Fiter, service doesn’t end at the end of the project. To ensure the success of the Mifos/Fineract implementation, Fiter follows up the project with the required training and support of the client’s team.  

By working closely with the client using Agile methodology throughout and after completion of the project, knowledge is transferred organically through the feature demos at the completion of each sprint. The customer gains first-hand experience of how features work by testing and approving the work already carried out.  Feedback on any omissions and/or improvements is documented and developed in the next sprints.

Once the project has been completed, formal training sessions are carried out to the satisfaction of the actual end users of the solution. The end users are onboarded by the Fiter support team to identify and bridge any knowledge gaps through virtual meetings, documentation and videos.

Leveraging Fiter’s global presence and local expertise during implementation

With presence in over 30 cities and 20 countries around the world, it’s no wonder “Fiter never sleeps” has become a catchphrase. At Fiter, there’s always a team member awake somewhere to ensure work continues 24/7. This allows for quick and seamless project delivery. Local expertise offers seamless communication in the local language as well as a better understanding of the local business standards and regulations.

The Mifos/Fineract competitive advantage by Fiter

The implementation of Mifos and Fineract has provided Fiter’s customers with innovative capabilities and solutions, giving them a competitive advantage in the market. Some of these main benefits are:

• Lower cost of ownership.
• The freedom to accelerate innovation without being limited to the standard software vendor’s pace.
• No vendor lock-in.
• The ability to develop solutions on top of Fineract via configuration or code changes.
• Fiter technical support and making necessary changes to the Fineract APIs code to make them compatible with external services and systems.
• Fiter’s organic onboarding before, during and after the project has been completed.

Organizations wanting to gain a competitive advantage in the financial market are looking for price-competitive solutions that can take them to the next level. Fiter is the world leader in Apache Mifos and Fineract implementations and customizations. With Fiter’s expertise and continuous support before, during and after the project, Fiter’s clients can position themselves better, faster and stronger to deal with tomorrow’s market challenges today.  Fiter never sleeps so that you can.

Reach out to us at  https://www.fiter.io/resources/contact to get started on taking your business to the next level.

The future of FinTech

As FinTech continues to drive the financial industry’s digital transformation, traditional banks and financial institutions will increasingly adopt FinTech solutions to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and reduce costs. 

The rapid development of AI and machine learning will also impact the FinTech world, enabling data-driven decision-making, risk assessment, and personalized financial services.

With its low implementation and testing costs and flexibility to allow businesses to expand their capabilities, an increasing number of traditional banking institutions and FinTechs are turning to the Apache Fineract platform to attain additional functionalities, introduce innovation, and increase their customer base and reach. 

As more businesses introduce Fineract, there is increasing demand to understand how to get started with Apache Fineract open source, bringing in more people in need of guidance and support.

Fiter’s role in FinTech

Fiter makes a point of being at the forefront of current and future transformations by offering cutting-edge digital solutions that cater to the evolving needs of both consumers and businesses. 

Fiter is the global leader in Fineract implementations. Fineract, as implemented through Fiter, possesses the flexibility to adapt to new trends in the market and to integrate with other systems which help make it even more robust and open to constant improvements via the Fineract Community. FinTech and the exciting possibilities it brings are taking over the future.

Fiter’s experience has led the company to fearlessly tackle projects of all shapes and sizes. Organizations of all levels of complexity and size can benefit from Fineract to grow their business. Fiter’s mission is to assist these businesses in reaching their objectives, with the understanding that software can scale in tandem with their growth. Fiter’s combined know-how, creativity and passion have proven time and time again that no project is too small or too big to become successful. 

About the Community Over Code Session:

While Cecilia has attended the Community Over Code (previously known as Apachecon) conference in previous years, this year she will be speaking at the conference in her session titled: Empowering Global FinTech Success: Implementing Fineract Across Borders.

In her talk, Cecilia will share, through real-world success stories, the fascinating journey of implementing Fineract across the globe for diverse FinTech clients, including banks, FinTechs of varying sizes, and NGOs. The presentation will cover the challenges that arose, the innovative solutions developed, and the transformative impact of Fineract toward achieving business goals.

The session will shed further light on key lessons learned, best practices, and strategies employed to ensure the seamless adoption and successful integration of Fineract including the inner workings of overcoming regulatory hurdles, adapting to diverse financial ecosystems, navigating cultural nuances, and addressing scalability concerns, as well as deep diving into the intricate details of global implementation projects.

Attendees will gain valuable insights into the technical intricacies of deploying Fineract, customizing it to meet specific client requirements, and leveraging its advanced capabilities to push the boundaries of innovation.

By the end of the session, participants will hopefully leave inspired by the customer success stories and having gained practical knowledge and strategies to overcome implementation challenges when deploying Fineract on a global scale. 

About Cecilia Menso

Cecilia Menso, Delivery Lead, Account and Project Manager at Fiter has had her share of professional challenges. In fact, Cecilia seems to actively seek them out! With over 20 years of experience in the IT sector, Cecilia has worked with clients in the manufacturing, telecommunications, and financial sectors across the globe. 

Since joining Fiter, Cecilia’s role has allowed her to actively contribute to the execution of multiple projects spanning different countries, catering to diverse client needs and varying project sizes. Cecilia has become increasingly impressed with Fineract’s versatility to meet any requirement. Cecilia is eager to share Fiter’s experiences, with the hope of inspiring others to embrace Fineract and explore the potential of open-source software, as well as to connecting with her Canadian customers who over the many years of working together have become her friends, hopefully over fish and chips!

Cecilia’s goals for the conference are to share her knowledge and insights, learn from others, get a bigger picture of what’s happening throughout the industry, and bring back cool ideas that can be used at Fiter to make things better for Fiter’s clients and the community.

Bio:

Javier Borkenztain

Co-founder and CEO of Fiter, an Apache Software Foundation Member and PMC member of the Apache Fineract Project.

Juan Esteban Saldarriaga:

Co-founder of RapiCredit, and Juancho Te Presta, two of the biggest online lenders in Colombia, CEO of Juancho Te Presta, Co-founder, president, and member of the board of the Colombian Fintech Association.

Uzoma Dozie

CEO of Diamond Bank, now merged with Access Bank to become the largest African bank with over 14 million customers.

In part 2 of our CEO panel, we discuss the ins and outs of building on top of the Apache Fineract open-source platform, the future of Fineract as well as what CEO’s should know about open-source. Catch up on additional insights in part 1 of our CEO panel here (add link once available).

Cross-Pollination

Customized Fineract-based products created by FinTechs combined with visibility and transparency within the community shorten product development time to market for other FinTechs. For example, a project in South America that can be customized and adopted in the African market to enhance customer experience there and add more value to that Fineract ecosystem. It is important to tap into the innovation that is going on to cross-pollinate and provide leverage to other companies.

The cross-pollination of ideas from within the global community can be leveraged by thousands of financial institutions across the globe and provides incredible added value to companies everywhere.

Platform potential and white space

Some of the areas of potential within the Fineract platform:

Funding: the way Fintechs are being funded, the way FinTechs connect to peer to originator platforms, sell the loan book to investors, and track those assets to investors all have the potential for solutions to be developed.

Loan visibility solutions: the ability to post loans to platforms, like Mintos, Bondsters, Get Income, Percent in the States, all those platforms that require API integration on how loans are sold to the marketplace and how the marketplace can see loan book performance.

Integration with loan book funders: Information needs to flow back and forth between what is originating and what is being bought as well as performance. The ecosystem should look at platforms like CrossLend in Germany and others to see what they’re doing and how these capabilities can be included in the Fineract open-source platform.

Going to market with open source vs. a traditional system

Since The capital outlay of traditional systems is huge, any downturn in the market hinders capabilities and the ability to adapt to the market and increases the risk of losses because traditional resources are limited. 

The forking trade-off

The recommended approach for working with Fineract is the forking approach: leveraging the ability to build customized solutions on the platform, very often by taking a new direction with the software without looking back or upstream first while making sure to contribute back to the community as much as possible. Sometimes that approach is not possible either because the community won’t accept the contribution or that the change is too disruptive. It’s always a trade-off.

Either way, nurturing the community and making your business is running the latest version is the recommended course of action.  Regardless, the biggest downside of using open source and customizing to individual needs is probably that future releases are hard to incorporate into specific company solutions.

Once a business starts customizing, a constant process which is carried out to adapt to the market and business needs, it becomes more difficult to merge with the most updated version of the Fineract. Thus, the biggest challenge with using Fineract, is probably that it’s difficult to merge any new releases into individual company versions.

Why should CEOs join the open-source movement?

Using developing markets as an example, each environment has its own unique issues and challenges even within the same continent.  Traditional banking systems encounter difficulties in addressing these issues.

The advantage of OSS is that it allows businesses to understand who their customers are and to build cost-effective solutions around it. Customizing traditional global system to address millions of people in a specific environment is extremely difficult and expensive.

With traditional applications, the more customization, the more expensive it gets. These costs cannot be passed on to the people the organization is attempting to serve. The advantage of open source, especially in developing markets, and in testing new markets and new areas, is that OSS supports cost-effective experimentation and testing.

Is the market now moving to open source?

The market is changing faster than ever. Organizations are looking for new systems that quickly adapt to changing markets. More people are asking questions about open-source software, looking for adaptive solutions that allow customized solutions and sustainability. OSS is a new avenue for both traditional businesses and FinTechs to stay ahead of the game. More and more people are beginning to understand the benefits of OSS, but more education is required to help people make smart decisions.

To find out how to use Apache Fineract to grow your business, contact us at: https://www.fiter.io/resources/contact

The financial community is seeing a trend in recent years of an increasing number of fintechs migrating to the open-source Fineract community and leveraging their capabilities on top of the Apache Fineract platform. We got together with Javier Borkenztain from Fiter for a session on understanding what is sparking the trend and the pivotal role Fiter is playing in bringing new users, companies, and vendors to the community.

What types of financial companies are there?

Fiter divides the banking solution vendors into three categories:

1.First Tier: These are the big, multinational fintechs that operate globally and generate $500M – $1B in annual revenues. 

2. Second Tier: Regional companies: Companies that generate tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue and operate regionally. These companies cover big countries or egions, but they are not global. They have regional coverage and excel within their region. 

3.Third Tier: Small companies: Companies that operate in a single country, with 60-80% market share within that country. 

Fineract today operates in the second and third tiers, competing with the local and regional vendors, operating regionally but with the capability to deliver a global product. 

What are some of the challenges fintechs face?

Fintechs face many challenges that can be supported by joining an open-source community. Some of these challenges are:

1. Differentiation and IP retention: Many fintechs are startups. As a startup, you want to build something innovative while retaining your intellectual property (IP), because your valuation will be substantially higher with intellectual property rather than with just having resources or clients. Anyone opting to build something or offer their clients different uses, a different UX or UI, a different experience than what the local competition is offering, would benefit from building it on a platform that’s different from what the competition is using. 

2. Limited resources: Often startups have limited resources and would therefore benefit from directing these resources toward development rather than toward buying software that’s already available as open source. The Fineract community is an open-source community of developers and business leaders and is free of license fees.

3. Creative flexibility: Proprietary software owned by the proprietary software vendor does not enable external contribution, so it does not allow you to build on top of it.

Which types of fintechs use Fineract?

1. Online lending fintechs: The same way that ecommerce is overtaking retail, so are online lenders overtaking brick and mortar financial institutions. Online lenders are very interested in using Fineract as their core banking platform and their numbers are growing. This is one of the biggest and hottest spaces. The lending fintechs that are using Fineract are mostly online originators that have no branches. They are pure ecommerce, and the product of the sales is money.

2. Neo banks / Digital banks: banks that are fully digital with all the capabilities of traditional banks but without the branches. Neo banks need to build their presence on top of a robust platform and some of them are choosing Fineract as their core application. They face the same issues with proprietary software and are migrating from their current vendor to Fineract to maximize the potential and the benefits of an open-source platform. 

3. E-wallets: e-wallets are an account linked to a debit card that allows them to pay and use that debit card either digitally or in a brick-and-mortar establishment. These e-wallets are also using Fineract as their core banking application to store their accounts. They can use the Fineract capabilities to create an account, track transactions, generate new accounts, KYC, etc. 

4. Peer-to-peer lenders: peer-to-peer lenders face two challenges simultaneously: choosing borrowers that are able to pay back the loan and finding 1-2 lenders for each borrower. They need to focus on building these two communities at once, which is very complicated. Fineract allows peer-to-peer lenders to modulate, replicate and track the life cycle of their asset, the loan, as well as the interest rate. With Fineract, they can track the borrowed amount and the invested amount. 

5. Payments and collection companies: these are companies that create a network of physical agents, usually kiosks. The agents are typically a merchant with a device, POS or Android, with an app inside. We see some of them using Fineract as their core application to replicate and to modulate their business. 

Why are fintechs migrating to Fineract? 

These are the top reasons based on my experience with Fineract:

A. User volume equivalent to major player: based on an estimate of 1000 global financial institutions running their operations on Fineract, Fineract stands shoulder to shoulder with the first tier global fintechs. 

B. Connections: Financial institutions shifted from being a big money safe to being valued for their connections: connections to payment networks, to agents, to credit cards, debit cards.  As a digital company, the more connections you have, the more valuable your company, and the more value you give your clients. The API functionality is one of the main reasons fintechs are migrating to Fineract in order to stay relevant. 

C. Full web capability: local and regional brick-and-mortar financial institutions are still using technology from the ‘90’s, ‘80s, or even older, as well as mainframes and COBOL as their software. There is a great deal of value being able to just open a web browser and use the system anywhere and everywhere without having to invest in servers and infrastructure.

D. Cloud-ready: Fineract is cloud-ready. The software runs on the cloud which makes it very valuable to fintechs that want to be nimble without being weighed down by huge infrastructure. The Fineract pay-per-use model is a huge advantage for the fintechs using it. Fineract can be implemented on any open cloud, private cloud or on premise. We’ve seen implementations and live implementations of Fineract on Google Cloud, Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Cloud. We also anticipate it being implemented in the Red Hat cloud in the near future. Fineract is agnostic in whichever infrastructure you want to implement it.

E. Fineract 1X features: Fineract 1X has an incredible number of features and growing. Fineract is different from other open-source projects in that you don’t need to be an expert or a technical person to use it. Financial experts are not technical people or coders or programmers. Fineract’s rest API architecture allows easy-to-configure financial products for non-programmers. That is something that is very unique and empowering to fintechs. Fineract is a tool that has an end, and one of the few projects around the world that is successful in doing this. The software is easy to learn which allows fintechs to be productive running the system in a short timeframe. Fiter offers training for developers, an advanced training program and a basic training program.

In Fineract, a community outperforms individuals. Fintechs are realizing the many benefits of Fineract and the trend of fintechs migrating to Fineract is growing. The expectation is that eventually the community building Fineract will overshadow proprietary software vendors due to its strength in numbers and growing global contribution toward a joint cause. The community will continue to grow and to strive to create a standard operation mode for financial institutions and financial service providers. Reach out to us at hello@fiter.ioto learn more about the Apache Fineract community and how Fiter can leverage the power of open source for your business.

Fineract has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Today, Apache Fineract has become a core application for Fintechs. In this article, Javier Borkenztain details exactly how Apache Fineract is achieving this. Read on to learn more about how Apache Fineract can help support your business.

From financial inclusion to financial accessibility

The financial market has made huge strides in achieving financial inclusion. More people than ever are now supported by financial services through brick-and-mortar banks, mobile phones, or the Internet. Following the success of financial inclusion, the focus has now shifted toward growing financial accessibility. Financial accessibility is a huge market. The need to provide better services, better apps, and core banking that allows Fintechs to connect with mobile phones, blockchain, API’s, etc. is the next step in the evolution of global finance.

What are some of the challenges Fintechs are currently facing?

Today’s Fintechs are working through a range of challenges including the need to make their services more API-driven and cloud-native while keeping up with a fast-paced financial environment.  Fintechs are striving to selectively choose and use the features they need without having to deal with high entry barriers and high licensing costs. These needs are leading Fintechs to prefer open-source software. In fact, in the past year, more new Fintech companies are adopting Apache Fineract as their core banking application than ever before.

What are the advantages of open-source software?

Financial transactions are the gateway through which people can connect at the service level, offering access to other people’s talents and skills. Open source offers low entry barriers for collaborations and for contributing back to the community. Financial institutions therefore greatly benefit from working through open-source solutions, gaining access to the fast pace of the new financial world and its evolution, preserving their relevance and competitiveness while simultaneously expanding their business.

 Synergy is the future of software development

Open source is based on a community of contributors versus an owner/vendor relationship. Community always outperforms the individual in open source. A community of companies is always more powerful than a single company. Open source is the pathway through which software is to be developed and standardized in the next decade. Another advantage of open source is the ability to maintain the IP on new developments. This is very important, especially for startups that need to retain their IP and their “secret sauce” to generate profits. Open source also eliminates recurring license costs.

What are the services Fintechs require from open source?

In the new financial world, different financial entities require different features and services. Building a marketplace around Apache Fineract can be leveraged to grow your business. Open-source solutions offer advantages in many areas, specifically in new types of services such as:

• Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Building a DeFi system requires refinancing, loaning, account and user management, scheduling, and repayment capabilities., all easily be created on Fineract.
• Banking as a service: a new service that is gaining traction. Independent financial entities now offer regulation or banking services to their customers based on the infrastructure they attain from financial institutions.
• Knowing Your Customer (KYC) management: KYC can be achieved to great benefit with Apache Fineract. Fineract allows financial institutions to connect with startups that offer KYC services. Using a simple picture, video, or picture of your customers’ ID, these companies can then process the information with machine learning and provide you with a comprehensive report including any alerts or callouts regarding your customer.

These companies develop the connectors, making them available to the Apache Fineract community through the Apache Fineract platform. Global financial institutions can then seamlessly use and benefit from these systems through Apache Fineract.

• Loan management systems: One of the most powerful functionalities that Apache Fineract has are multiple loan capabilities. These include individual loans, group loans, mortgage loans, asset loans, etc.
• E-wallets: Customers require the ability to transact based on their account. They may have multiple accounts or accounts in multiple currencies. E-wallet providers use Fineract as a core banking application to manage the complexities of E-wallet services.
• Exchanges: Customers logged into a crypto exchange have an account with different currencies. Balances can easily be displayed in Apache Fineract based on different software. Apache Fineract enables the creation of an easy-to-use exchange platform. The order book, now the core functionality of any exchange, is integrated with Apache Fineract and other open-source modules.
• Investment accounts: Investment companies use Apache Fineract for managing their customers’ investment portfolios or specific investments for each customer. In fact, building a complete set of functionalities based on Apache Fineract is what makes Apache Fineract so attractive to Fintechs, and is one of the leading reasons for Fintechs to make Fineract their core banking app for the expansion of their systems.

How do new financial players benefit from Fineract?

• Neo banks and digital banks are banks created from scratch. They typically do not have buildings or branches to visit. The bank is essentially in the palm of your hand – on your cell phone. Many neo banks are now being built based on Apache Fineract because Fineract is perfect for them.
• Online lenders: Online vendors are growing quickly globally, using Apache Fineract as their core loan management system. One of the best features of Apache Fineract is that it allows any lender to use it out of the box with minimal configuration and customization, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing and software purchases.

Thanks to its API-based infrastructure, Apache Fineract allows Fintechs to create services, and connect with multiple front ends and service providers, credit bureaus, channels to clients, banks, and KYC services. The Open API movement is making banks more hub-like rather than just value storage vaults. Its openness, collaboration, and flexibility make Apache Fineract highly attractive to Fintechs around the world. With its active community and the thousands of financial institutions and Fintechs using it, Apache Fineract offers a robust platform that is leading the way in the new world of finance.