Put open source to work
July 16–17, 2018: Training & Tutorials
July 18–19, 2018: Conference
Portland, OR

Cloud-native open source on the blockchain for financial inclusion

Myrle Krantz (The Apache Software Foundation)
4:15pm–4:55pm Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Blockchain
 Location: Portland 256
Level: Non-technical
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • Open source developers looking for a way to give back and banking executives looking to reach the unbanked

Prerequisite knowledge

  • A basic understanding of cloud computing

What you'll learn

  • Understand the concept of financial inclusion
  • Explore Fineract's scalable, cloud-native architecture
  • Discover the role blockchain plays in financial inclusion

Description

Globally, abject poverty has declined by 90% in the last hundred years. The key to reaching the remaining 10% is providing financial services to the unbanked, and open source and transparent distributed systems are lowering the cost of providing these services.

Microfinance provides very small loans to people without other access to banking services so that they can buy the supplies they need to start businesses. The Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for this innovative approach to reducing poverty. However, tracking loans and interest requires banking software, and proprietary solutions are expensive.

Fineract is a project for providing banking software to these institutions. Myrle Krantz offers an overview of Fineract CN, the cloud-native version of Apache Fineract, built as a microservice architecture, and Stellar, an open source blockchain implementation for transferring fiat currencies in a secure, transparent manner.

Photo of Myrle Krantz

Myrle Krantz

The Apache Software Foundation

Myrle Krantz is vice president of Apache Fineract, an open source cloud-native platform for banking the unbanked. A software architect with 20 years of experience developing APIs and scalable systems, Myrle has been exuberant about financial inclusion since she was introduced to microfinance by the Mifos Initiative.