The Mifos Initiative

Solution Pitch

The Problem

More than three billion underbanked people worldwide lack access to basic financial services. Financial inclusion is recognized as a proven means of poverty reduction by increasing economic resilience and expanding economic opportunity. Recent World Bank and Global Findex data show extreme poverty is on the decline, but the rate of poverty reduction is slowing. The need for responsible financial services has never been higher as the world is not on track to end extreme poverty by 2030 as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Digital Financial Services (DFS), primarily mobile money and new account openings, have been the primary driver of increased financial inclusion. The 2021 Global System for Mobile Communications State of the Industry Report showed there are more than 1.2 billion registered mobile money accounts, yet only 300 million were active on a 30-day basis in 2020. In order to achieve meaningful usage of DFS; access alone is simply not enough to end extreme poverty.

The Solution

Mifos provides a common public good—modern core banking and payments infrastructure—delivered as open-source building blocks by a global community that can be composed into financial services of any form. Mifos’s building blocks, recognized as digital public goods, make core banking commoditized infrastructure, empowering organizations anywhere to embed financial services to customers via any channel. Fully open-source and hosted in the cloud, the platform is delivered via APIs and reference apps to provide common functionalities for creating customers; managing wallets, savings, and loan accounts, as well as orchestrating payments and maintaining financial ledgers and reports. 

Mifos’s framework enables institutions of any size to digitally transform, lower costs, operate efficiently, innovate rapidly, and use data-driven insights to serve their customers effectively. Mifos’s global community and ecosystem of local partners are critical to reaching the world’s three billion underbanked people. This network unlocks a virtuous cycle of commercial companies, collectively contributing to the upstream codebase while building and supporting solutions locally. This contribution model lowers the cost of developing, maintaining, and innovating new software and enables focused investment on innovation that matters the most.

Stats 

• Reaching over 20 million clients through 400+ institutions using solutions powered by Mifos APIs.

Market Opportunity

In 2021, banks spent $10.84 billion on core banking software globally, which is projected to grow to $34.48 billion by 2028. There is a growing shift towards outsourced managed services, whether it’s cloud core banking systems or banking as a service for fintechs. With this shift, core banking costs will decrease for software and IT personnel and increase for cloud infrastructure and subscription fees. 

Digitization is a tremendous driver of increased revenue and lower costs. McKinsey estimates that digital transformation could add 45 percent to their annual net revenues: 15 percent from enhanced product uptake and 30 percent from reduced operational costs. The International Finance Corporation calculates that it reduces the annual cost to serve a customer by 80 percent, and creates an 18 percent reduction in the cost-to-income ratio.

Organization Highlights

• Co-lead of the OpenG2P Initiative.

• Strategic Partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Corent, and AWS.

Partnership Goals

• Web consulting to cater to multiple stakeholders, particularly to establish a customizable messaging platform.

• Female board members across the fundraising and non-profit domain and/or the financial services and inclusion sector.

• Legal counsel to reflect the growing nature of professional services offered, legal advice on structuring Mifos’s sponsorship program, advice on setting up a hybrid organization structure of a for-profit/nonprofit, and advising on offering more involved services like hosting, L3 support, etc.

• Business expertise to launch and scale a sponsorship program.

• Communications advising for brand messaging and market sizing.

• Data consulting for impact measuring and evaluation.