Thank you for joining our Financial Inclusion Week 2024 discussion: The Future of Finance is Open. 
We are proud to support the Centre for Financial Inclusion

We believe that open finance will provide opportunities for both innovators and incumbents as financial inclusion leaps forward in the coming years.

The rise of open technologies will underpin financial inclusion through open-source licensing, open APIs, and allowing digital sovereignty.

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Hosted By

Access to credit is access to opportunity.  Begini was founded on the idea of broadening credit access modern behavioural analytics data. We use advanced data science to assess character traits associated with an individual’s willingness to repay. Character has been shown to be a resilient and reliable indicator of someone’s likelihood to default.

We believe in giving credit where it’s due. Our assessments can collect or create first-party data, using zero personal information. This data informs our models, producing insights which are used to give safe credit to more people. We believe there is a fairer way to give access to credit, we are looking for organisations and individuals who share our mission.

The Mifos Initiative is a US-based 501(c)3 non-profit whose mission is to speed the elimination of poverty by leading a global community that builds, supports, and uses Mifos X, a free and open source platform enabling financial service providers to more effectively and efficiently deliver responsible financial services to the world’s 3 billion poor and unbanked. Our unprecedented approach to technology-enabled financial inclusion unites financial institutions, local technology partners, and volunteer developers to collectively advance open source banking infrastructure so the entire sector can sustainably build impactful innovations in digital financial services.

Panelists

David Higgins

David Higgins

Director of Programs | Mifos Initiative

David has over 23 years’ experience in managing Enterprise IT and large-scale development programmes in the Telecommunications, Financial Services and Fintech sectors. For the past 18 months David has been leading Mifos work with the ITU GovStack programme; helping them specify a Payment Building Block, and supplying a working Payment Building Block instance based on Mifos DPGs and working on Mifos work for DPIs. This has included project management of the Interledger Grant funded work on how “ILP for DPI”.

James Hume

CEO | Begini

James is a Senior Executive & Board Member with 20+ years in Financial Technology, specifically financial inclusion in emerging markets. He worked on pioneering mobile wallet technology in Africa & Asia through eServGlobal, as well as the creation of a digital cross-border platform which led to a JV with Mastercard called HomeSend, which is now processing $1b+ in CB transactions P/A.
Ed Cable

Ed Cable

President | Mifos Initiative

As the President/CEO of the Mifos Initiative and founding member of the Apache Fineract PMC, Edward Cable is a leader in technology-enabled financial inclusion and open-source financial services innovation. Since his time at the Wharton School, Edward has understood and proven the catalytic power of communities – first through the cooperative movement, then through financial inclusion, and now through open source for financial services. Edward joined the Mifos project in 2007, incubating the community as part of the initial team guiding the project within the Grameen Technology Center. He led the spinout of the Mifos Initiative in 2011, overseeing the evolution of both the platform as well as the open-source community as a transformative force for microfinance, financial inclusion and now digital financial services. When not focused on cultivating innovative fintech solutions, Edward tends to his menagerie of animals including goats, dogs, rabbits, and chickens in the majestic Redwoods.

Victor Romero

Victor Romero

CTO | Techeando

Hailing from Mexico City, Victor Romero now has over 20 years of experience in the area of Information Technology applied to Financial Services after completing his Bachelor of Computer Science at the National Polytechnic Institute, As co-founder of Fintechando, the company that creates digital solutions based on the Mifos and Fineract Ecosystem, he has successfully overcome challenges related to aligning Open-Source Technologies to the regulatory rules for bringing best in class software to Financial Institutions to strike a balance between innovation and compliance. During this journey, Victor has implemented APIs that enable customer-facing flows and improve the user experience while handling securely the sensitive data of the financial transactions. Having used Mifos X and Mifos Payment Hub Enterprise Edition as two of the pillars to solve the needs of banking and fintech customers, Victor is adept at crafting innovative solutions using open-source core banking APIs.