Fineract had a 3-day track at the ApacheCon @home 2021 edition. We had 20 conferences, panels, and discussions around the future of our industry, community, and project. 

All the conferences and panels are now available on Youtube to watch. 

Here is a curated list of the Fineract and Fintech Track at Apache 2021 so you can revisit the talks anytime. 


Diego Gutierrez Zaldívar, Manuel Beaudroit, Javier Borkenztain

Bitcoins, blockchain, and decentralized finance have been around for over a decade and are here to stay. Blockchain is currently supported by open source platforms and has become the ledger of global economy.

  • What integration possibilities does fineract have with Blockchain?
  • How will we improve ourselves as a result of this revolution?
  • What lessons can we learn from the DeFi's?
  • How can we contribute to this new era?


Lalit Mohan Sanagavarapu, Jeremy Engelbrecht

World over "data" is considered as new "oil". Organizations are mining data available within their own systems, their partners, across all devices, and on the internet to enhance customer experience, drive operational efficiency, and deliver data-driven tailor-made services to consumers. Financial institutions are using data for credit scoring, fraud detection, adaptive authentication, virtual assistants and many other personalized services. Mifos has started its journey with 3 use cases - credit scoring, chatbots and progress out of poverty index (PPI). Our community working group is refining existing use cases and adding new use cases to optimize the customer journey. We'll showcase our work to date across the community and ecosystem with our data science-driven credit scoring tools. We'll share progress on our roadmap, with continued work on open source and on cloud machine learning API/libraries with explainability and security and forthcoming plans to focus on federated and democratized learning to address data challenges.

James Dailey

This is a presentation that summarizes the many threads of the Fineract and FinTech track at ApacheCon by PMC member and project founder/original architect. This will start with a summary of the role that open source is now playing in financial services, the evolution of this project, associated projects, and picking up on the themes of microfinance, financial inclusion, credit services, and cloud based banking-as-a-service. It will also unveil the results of a survey, to be conducted in August 2021, that builds upon a previous survey conducted on Fineract in 2019, covering attitudes about the project and the diversity of the community. Finally, the talk will be a call to action: to make the project more of a commons for all of those who see the value in open source for democratizing financial services.

Frank Nkuyahaga

This is a talk about our experiences with Fineract implementing it for our clients, the challenges we faced and how we overcame them. Most notable is how we dealt with performance issues, memory management and handling ever increasing number of requests coming in from various micro services.

Also based on our experiences, we'll also propose some improvements to Fineract that we believe will make it better going forward.

Kelly Switt

The needs of the 21st-century digital economy require financial services to be always on, real-time, and contextually embedded.

Yet, the current world of analog banking continues to be constrained by end-of-day processes; cut-off times and store and forward messaging, leaving a chasm between 21st century digital needs and the financial services that serve it. Fintechs bridge that chasm, bringing banking into the 21st century.

Red Hat announces the launch of a partnership program in support of the Fintech community.

Wes Wasson, Sofie Blakstad, Robert Timmer

Savings-led financial inclusion is finally being heralded for its deep impact and reach to the last mile. Countless individuals at the base of pyramid rely upon these informal savings groups of various forms in every region for a safe place to save and access to credit. A new breed of fintechs has emerged that are digitally transforming these groups with cutting edge technologies to provide the benefits of digitization with a powerful user experience the maintains that the high-touch, intimacy, and impact that has made them so successful. Our panel of four innovative fintechs have each pioneered their own unique approach to digitizing these most informal of financial services. We will take a closer look at why savings-led financial inclusion is so impactful in its various forms, the massive need and opportunity in digitally including members of these groups, the innovative approaches that have been taken to preserve group dynamics, and the benefits digitization entails - graduation to formal financial services, credit scoring and increased security, transparency, and financial literacy. These insights can help Fineract evolve as a robust back-end platform to better power these innovative last-mile solutions.

James Dailey

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are an emerging set of blockchain and cryptographic enabled solutions that taken together forms a national cryptocurrency. It has the support of the International Bank of Settlement (IBS) as a promising area of innovation. Can CBDCs challenge the status quo of banking systems? How does the CBDC allow the Central Bank to do clearing and settlements across different assets class better? What would a global architecture look like? What would cause Central Banks to adopt CBDCs? How does this relate to one basic-account-per-person provide for an economy? This is survey of the current discussion and speculation on the future of CBDCs.

Juan Esteban Saldarriaga, Uzoma Dozie, Javier Borkenztain

During this panel, the CEOs of two successful fintech companies in Colombia and Nigeria will take us through their companies journey in implementing Fineract.

Why did they choose Fineract as the engine to implement core banking software? What challenges did they face and how Fineract flexibility allowed them to sort them? How is the software scalability going along with the companies growth? His view on how Fineract can support all types of fintech projects?

John Ruhiu

As bigger and more complex organizations adopt Fineract as their core banking system it's becoming necessary to enhance many features to cope with the requirements of these organizations.

The accounting module available out of the box is designed to cater to transaction-related journal entries. This is not sufficient for larger organizations that require other accounting modules such as asset management, payroll, branch accounting, and richer analysis and reporting.

One option is to extend the accounting module in Fineract to include these features. The other option is to integrate with a mature ERP that has these features. After some analysis, it turned out that the second option is far better.

In this presentation, we are going to look at how we successfully integrated with Odoo. The challenges, wins, and opportunities.

Ed Cable, Jill Shemin, James Dailey, Karina Lizeth Ortiz Muñoz, Raul Salomon Almeraya Sibaja

In ApacheCon@Home 2020 we introduced this new effort and this year we report back on challenges and progress made:

OpenG2P is a digital public good digitizing large scale cash transfers with open source building blocks, recently designated by Digital Public Goods Alliance. Meanwhile GovStack is a global effort to define a set of building blocks, especially open source, for governments to leverage when building new systems.

These efforts, underway just in the last two years, are starting with the requirements for government services and building out open APIs between components. This discussion will be about the various architectural decisions, lessons learned and next phases of the project.

Aleksandar Vidakovic, Nayan Ambali, Istvan Molnar

"As the community gradually advances Fineract CN, as a cloud-native microservices application framework for digital financial services enabling highly scalable wallet and transactional accounts, Fineract 1.x continues to prove itself as a robust, mature. and feature-rich lending platform. From microfinance institutions serving millions, to digital credit providers delivering instant mobile loans, fintechs offering sophisticiated SME and working capital lending via complex algorithms, banks providing housing and property loans, to e-commerce companies providing consumer revolving lines of credit and buy now pay later, Fineract 1.x is at the heart of hundreds of institutions managing loans of all sizes, complexities, and delivery channels. The continued growth and adoption of Fineract 1.x across the ecosystem makes evident how reliable, relevant, and recognized it has become for its loan managment and why we must evolve its architecture.

This session will highlight a number of case studies demonstrating the scale, breadth of loan functionality, and complexity of lending use cases supported by Fineract 1.x and an active discussion amongst the most senior architects of solutions powered by Fineract on how the community can refactor and refine the existing Fineract 1.x architecture to enable greater scalability and improved performance, better maintainability and faster testing, ease of development, and higher modularity and extensibility while continuing to leverage the robust business logic it contains. This session will inform the roadmap of Fineract 1.x and collective efforts to refine it's architecture. "

Orang Dialameh

Identity security, wallet balances, and payments capabilities do not extend to billions of people, partly because the hardware and software models are based on always on data and connectivity. What if hardware based security in an appropriate form factor could be used to secure off-grid payments, enable merchants and individuals to self- register with biometrics, and create an entirely new payment rails at the edge. This talk will explore the work we've done around this concept, and the linkages to blockchain and legacy payment and wallet systems.

Kanchana Welagedara

Fintech organizations often share common problems in their engineering systems. Cultural inefficiencies, engineering silos, slow innovation, lack of quality mentorship, and collaboration are well-known issues. Apache way is often brought in to resolve those. During this ongoing pandemic, it's was proven that people can work productively from any geography when engineers collaborate effectively. ASF shared that lesson with tech world for 20 years. FinTech realized that Apache way is the bleed-ing edge engineering behaviors to follow and let's dig in how.

  1. Practicing Apache way behaviors within a firewall
  2. First choice of open source software
  3. Shifting away from Silo'ed Architecture
  4. Finding reusable patterns in problem-solving
  5. Interest in contributing back to open source communities
  6. Use the power of the community to lead innovation.
  7. Q&A

Robert Jakech

1.7 billion people lack financial access at all, but 6 billion are underserved. And by underserved I mean slow, expensive, and complex services. Let's focus on the entire financial system, rather than a part of it.

The principal raw material for the financial industry is money. And money is technology. This technology has been evolving since we used shells as a means of payment, and now it's digital. The excluded ones are from the digital economy. From the global economy. They are using cash, your access to services and products with cash is as far as your arm can reach to give it to another one. But the rest of us, the ones in the digital economy, we need much more.

With open source solutions, we can collaborate with others in ways we couldn't imagine before. A global solution for a global problem. Working in the Fineract community, we learn how to cooperate with others in other places. The world is moving that way very fast, and we develop solutions in a way the problems are generated.

The problems to be solved now are access problems, they are problems that ignore borders, and live in the cloud.

Graham McBain

Financial technology has a long history of being siloed, hard to use, and based on antiquated infrastructure. The larger software development ecosystem however has always embraced open source, and collaboration. Recently we have been able to unlock the knowledge of how to build financial infrastructure through open source projects and community building. In this talk we'll discuss how simply giving people a forum to connect has fostered a strong community of engineers to rebuild financial primitives that are at once not a differentiator for anyone, but are a problem for everyone.

Javier Borkenztain

Apache Fineract is open-source financial software that offers entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers a dependable, scalable, and cost-effective solution for providing financial services to the world's underserved.

It is a mature platform with open APIs that allows loan, account, and KYC management as a core banking framework.

Fineract platform is actually being used worldwide in 50 countries by more than 1000 institutions that take advantage of this efficient, modern, and cost-effective open-source alternative, to develop loan products, KYC, AML, and accounts tailored as required for their businesses.

We will review in-depth how digital bank, digital lender, and other innovative fintechs are using Fineract as there core financial platform.

Istvan Molnar, Godfrey Kutumela

A new frontier for payments is on the horizon with the continued widespread adoption of national real-time payment systems, the acceptance of global standards like ISO 20022, the emergence of open banking APIs for third party payment initiation, and the continued growth of mobile money. The Payment Hub EE - the open source bridge and microservices orchestration layer Mifos is building to seamlessly enable accounts and wallets managed on Fineract to initiate transactions over modern real-time payment rails via mobile channels and Open APIs, is equipping institutions with modern enterprise-grade architecture to harness these emerging trends around payments. This session will explore the emerging trends and standards around payments, a showcase of the Payment Hub EE and its roadmap in shaping our long-term vision to enable the sector to go beyond payments, remittances, and transfers to the next frontier of meaningful, value-added payments - for-purpose remittances, interoperable cross-border transfers, split payments to multiple parties, merchant/billpayer requests to pay, rich invoices, and more.

Art Muthiora, James Dailey, Rupesh Raikundalia, Luisa Martinez

Assessing the fit for Fineract with member-owned financial institutions in regulated markets. Credit Unions are organized around principles that align well with the mission of Fineract: financial inclusion and community based. That makes them natural partners. Their product mix of mortgage loans, credit services, and savings as well as connections to payment mechanisms are in line with the direction of Fineract and the Mifos open source components. This moderated panel discussion will dig into the functional alignment and define the process by which regulated credit unions could adopt the solution set.

Ademola Babalola

Across the continent, Fineract is revolutionizing the delivery of financial services in Sub-Saharan Africa. From grassroots savings groups going the last mile, to SACCOs and microfinance institutions digitizing their operations in the cloud to innovative fintechs serving millions via digital financial services, to banks, telcos, and platfins reaching the mass markets - Fineract is leveling the playing field and democraitizing financial services though robust, open source core banking infrastructure.

This session will feature an esteemed panel of diverse players from the Mifos and Fineract ecosystem who will take about the massive opportunity to serve the needs of the Base and the Middle of the Pyramid, practical use case of Fineract on the continent, the trends that will transform the sector, the challenges in reaching the last mile, how the roadmap will be shaped by the latest trends, the potential of new innovation and business models that can be powered by Fineract, and the growing open source ecosystem and how Fineract is fueling that.

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