Fintech Advances for the Biggest Whale and the Smallest Fish - Meet Ed Cable

What image comes to mind when you think about a visionary fintech leader, developing new global technologies to advance finance into extraordinary new realms? Realms unimaginable only a couple decades ago? Do you imagine someone with dollar signs in their eyes, talking like they own the whole monopoly board? 

Finance is not the study of human greed. It is the study of money – which is how humanity has stored and traded value across centuries. Financial technologies have many types of potential - for destruction, morally neutral progress, AND for good. Please allow me the honor of introducing you to Ed Cable, an altruistic fintech leader creating and synthesizing financial technologies for world redefining good.

Talking to him is an adventure – he has so many technical details on the tip of his tongue, and big ideas backed by even bigger actions are bursting at his seams. It takes a few minutes to sit back and digest the magic of his venture to truly appreciate both the current impact and the potential impact. He’s too busy doing to focus on the telling.

Apparently Ed’s non-showy leadership is by design. He believes in Judo Strategy – and has built Mifos under the radar, not wishing to catch the attention of big institutions until strategically ready. Not always “building out loud” has given the chance for advances in technologies to spontaneously emerge. He shares that innovations in the field have informed sophisticated institutional technology.

For instance, technology used to enable loan officers on motorbikes in India to meet physically with groups of people to open accounts, physically disburse money, and collect repayments has been incorporated into institutional technologies, at both global banks and fintechs. Those technologies are being used to open 200,000 BNPL accounts a day for a single institution.

As Mifos enters the next stage in its growth trajectory, Ed and his team will invest greater resources into measuring and tracking impact, and telling the stories of change that Mifos has underwritten with its technologies.

So what is Mifos?

Ed was working for the Grameen Foundation, where the idea for Mifos was born under the leadership of James Dailey, and then later spun-off into its own 501(c)(3) by Ed and his colleague, Craig Chelius. Ed was thrilled when asked to lead, and has been doing so for more than 15 years, since the birth of the modern fintech era.

Mifos is on a mission to create, maintain, and continually expand a set of open source building blocks for banking, so that financial services can be embedded anywhere and everywhere. This will serve as the foundation for financial health for every single human being on this planet, ensuring universal access to meaningful financial services for the world’s 3 billion poor and underbanked “Maries”* and beyond.

“We want to create a level playing field. Financial services need to be a basic human right. We need to equip institutions where the consumers actually are, including small grassroots institutions, with the same technology the more sophisticated players have.”

The magic words here are “open source” - they open the doors to collaboration, and to the virtuous cycle for financial sustainability.

Because duplicative and stand alone efforts are obsolete.

There are many fintechs out there setting up in the same spaces - embedded finance, digital payments, personalized offers and financial guidance, etc. Companies in these areas compete over the same resources to build parallel structures, spending time and resources fixing problems their peers may have already resolved.

Competition may breed excellence, and has its place. However, Mifos, with its collaborative, community-oriented resources, is a tremendous resource that I point many of these fintechs towards. It’s an incredible opportunity to leapfrog past tremendous obstacles, and the associated financial outlay. 

Ask yourself, what could having access to the billions of dollars of resources that are part of the Mifos ecosystem, for free, do to advance your fintech?

Stand alone core banking systems are obsolete. Stand alone digital financial institutions will fail. Today’s systems are far too disconnected, far too costly, and far too closed to enable the reach, the innovation, and the scale necessary to provide access to meaningful financial services for the world’s 3 billion poor and underbanked “Maries,” and beyond. 

How do you fund such a monumental undertaking?

The core of Mifos’ financial sustainability through the massive growth required for this vision is the “Virtuous Cycle.” Through upstream-first development, Mifos enables a virtuous cycle that unlocks scale, catalyzes innovation, and enables the long term sustainability of the initiative. Everyone collectively maintains the core, creating a multiplier effect far beyond that of any one vendor alone.

“You get what you pay for, everyone gets what you pay for, and you get what everyone pays for,” Paul Ramsey.

This is the part of Mifos’ vision that has Ed the most excited. Throughout his life, a primary driver of his endeavors has been a desire to build inclusive community. He believes in community that all participants fluidly give to and receive from, and in doing so build long-lasting and shared abundance. 

Beyond the financial digital public goods that Mifos develops and gives free access to, they provide consulting services to assist entities across the globe understand how to best build using Mifos’ assets. For governments and non-profits that share the Mifos mission, they may do this with the assistance of Mifos donor organizations.
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They also provide consulting to private, for-profit companies that are able to provide sponsorship fees. This helps Mifos ensure an inclusive organization for all and the sustainability of their mission by sharing upstream-first developments back into the Mifos system.

What is success if not money?

For most fintechs, the primary measure of success may be financial. For a non-profit like Mifos, this is not the case. So what does success look like for a fintech organization, if not money? Well, some of Mifos’ success metrics include the number of institutions using Mifos’ software and assets (currently five hundred plus), and the number of users/borrowers reached (more than 35,000,000).

Mifos has to make further strides towards ensuring the virtuous cycle of sustainability. There are several unicorns built on the platform, including a software valued at two billion dollars. Sustainability should not be a question at this point, only a matter of connecting the right dots. Proving the virtuous cycle of sustainability seems philosophical as much as necessary – what better way to demonstrate the power of fintech for good?

Mifos has big dreams – widespread adoption of the Mifos technologies, driven and fed by the virtuous cycle of sustainability. With this dream now very close to vibrant fruition, I asked Ed what the biggest concern will be in the next stage of the organization’s growth trajectory.  

“Ensuring the proper resources are accessible to prioritize the needs of the smallest institutions on the platform.”

Ed’s always looking out for the smallest fish in the ocean.  

Does Ed seem like the kind of guy better suited for homesteading out in the woods?

Well, apparently you can be a fintech leader and still keep a few chickens and goats as pets. He also has three dogs, one of which has genetically tested at 40% gray wolf. Apparently his wolf-dog does not eat his chickens, so that’s working out.

Ed tried also keeping a yak, but that did NOT work out because it turned out it wasn’t the “mini” breed he thought he had purchased. The yak grew about three times bigger! Ed muses that this experience was similar to that of growing Mifos – both grew slowly over time, and when you’re lost in the day-to-day, you don’t notice the growth. But before you know it, you realize that the growth has been tremendous and beyond your wildest expectations.

Here are some pictures of his pets.

​I’ve known Ed for a long time, and he’s always been too cool for me. We went to Wharton together as undergraduate students, still seeking our place in the world. 

Afterwards, while he set off on the fantastic adventure of building Mifos, I too worked in emerging markets finance, for a large multilateral investor. I found myself admiring Ed’s career path. I longed for world changing innovation and impact as a phrase with palpable meaning, and not one covered in bureaucratic dust. Later I joined the world of entrepreneurship, eventually focusing my attention on providing communications and investor relations support to fintechs.

So I was over the moon when Ed gave me the opportunity to support Mifos. It’s been an absolute pleasure to learn from him, and to see that he’s not at all “too cool for us”, he’s living his coolest life for all of us, and for all of the Maries out there who deserve inclusion in the global financial system. We’re all welcome at the Mifos party.
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* Marie Claire of Rwanda is the inspiration and namesake of Mifos’ mission. Through financial inclusion enabled self determination, she triumphed over the poverty in which she was born, in spite of the challenges of HIV and the death of her husband. She started two thriving businesses employing others, and to build a home for herself and her four children.