Last month, the Mojaloop Foundation hosted its final Community Meeting of the year in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The four-day event brought together community members from around the world and was a wonderful opportunity to connect and network face-to-face with some of the brightest minds in the digital payments space. As always, the event had no shortage of engaging and educational sessions, all of which are now available on our PI-20 playlist on YouTube. Read on for highlights from some of the key presentations at the event.
Rwanda SI’s Experience
In this interesting panel we heard from Alain Kajangwe, founder and CEO of WiredIn, Jean Claude Nkizabagabo, CEO of Orion Systems and Design LTD and Bobson Rugambwa, CEO of MVend Limited. In a discussion moderated by Steve Haley of the Mojaloop Foundation, the three discussed their work and their experiences with Mojaloop. WiredIn, a software development company, has been working on an interoperability platform in Rwanda that has been live for seven months. MVend Limited is a FinTech with a platform that digitizes more than 70 SACCOs and 3,900 Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA), linking them to banks to make it easier for members to send money. Orion Systems provides payment system integration between banks and ewallets and serves 26 commercial banks in East Africa. Each panelist shared details about their company’s experience using Mojaloop, how it has helped them and its role in future implementation plans. Check out the complete conversation here.
Mini-loop
Later that day, Tom Daly of Crosslake Technology shared a Mini-loop update presentation with the group. He opened with a recap around what Mini-loop is and what it’s used for. In a nutshell, Mini-loop makes it easier for more users to access Mojaloop, which helps grow the community. Tom spoke to Mini-loop’s, ease of use, speed (15-20 minutes for entire hub and services) and low cost. He also explained how Mini-loop provides a quick, convenient, isolated way for users to try the latest Mojaloop technology to assist in determining their upgrade path. Review the complete presentation to learn more.
Mojaloop on Microsoft Azure
Another interesting session came from Jason Gregory of Microsoft, who gave an update on the Mojaloop on Azure project, sharing completion status and next steps. During the presentation, he looked at the journey they’ve been through, the degree of completion against initial thinking, baseline architecture, the reasoning for embarking on the project and the capabilities it will provide in the longer term. The project was kicked off with three solution goals related to operational and cost optimization, improving ease of deployment for adopters and leveraging the hybrid capabilities of Azure. Ultimately, the hope was to drive adoptability with low management and low complexity. In terms of completion, key achievements included getting a fully tested and validated model of Mojaloop running on Azure native in the public cloud, building all of the deployment scripts and running against the test suites. Watch the full presentation to learn more about what the project accomplished, as well as some key areas operators hope to revisit at a later stage.
vNext Build Progress Update
Our final highlighted presentation came from the vNext team. They started with a refresher on what a reference architecture is: a set of documents that captures the essence of the product and provides guidance on the implementation of its future versions. Presenters then provided an overview of what vNext is, the strict implementation of the Reference Architecture designed around its bounded context approach, and why we need it. They also discussed what we’re currently lacking in terms of reference architecture and what we can do better. Finally, they gave a reference architecture shout-out to the team responsible for delivering it, an enormous community achievement, and concluded with a look at next steps. To learn more, check out the whole presentation here.
Of course, the above only scratches the surface of all that was discussed and shared at the event. For all the sessions, tune into our YouTube channel, and whether you made it to Zanzibar, dialed-in remotely or are just catching up now, we hope you found these sessions valuable. Stay tuned for details on our next Community Meeting in early 2023.
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