Mifos Initiative
Public records show a registered, tax-exempt organization in good standing.
What it says it does
We provide education training and tools to enable charitable organizations and social enterprises to deliver financial services to the poor making financial inclusion more affordable accessible and effective to the 3 billion underbanked and unbanked in the world.
- Income
- $2.8 million
- Spending
- $2.9 million
- Spent on programs
- 100%
- Reserves
- 2.5 months of spending
- Largest source of income
- fees for its services, 83%
- Employees
- 1
- Volunteers
- 175
- Highest pay
- $120,680, president ceo
Source: Form 990 for the year ending December 31, 2024, filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Rating method 2026.2. How we rate
Financial health
Fair: 68 out of 100. Higher than 43% of charities in its peer group (community improvement, $1m to $10m).
Reserves
10 of 35Spendable reserves would cover 2.5 months of spending.
Debt
20 of 20It owes 1% of what it owns.
Living within its means
8 of 15Spending exceeded income by 3% of income.
Income trend
15 of 15Income rose 2% on the year before.
Spending floor
15 of 15100% of spending went to programs and raising each dollar of donations cost 0 cents.
Source: Form 990 for the year ending December 31, 2024, filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Rating method 2026.2. How we rate
Governance
Good: 70 out of 100. Higher than 20% of charities in its peer group (community improvement, $1m to $10m).
Independent board
25 of 255 of 6 voting board members are independent.
Conflict of interest policy
15 of 15Has a written conflict of interest policy.
Whistleblower policy
0 of 8Reports no written whistleblower policy.
Record keeping policy
0 of 7Reports no written policy on keeping and destroying records.
Board minutes
5 of 5Keeps minutes of board meetings.
Board sees the tax return
10 of 10Gave the board a copy of this return before filing it.
Pay set independently
5 of 5Sets its chief executive's pay through independent review and comparison.
Independent check of accounts
0 of 15Its accounts were not audited or reviewed by an independent accountant.
No reported misuse
10 of 10Reports no diversion of assets, excess benefits or loans to insiders.
Source: Form 990 for the year ending December 31, 2024, filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Rating method 2026.2. How we rate
Impact evidence
Describes programs. Its tax return describes what it does but we have found no measurable results in it.
Programs described in its return (3)
- $2.2 million spent. Software Dev DEV: Mifos X and Fineract are free & open source financial software developed to build the complete range of financial services required for effective financial inclusion at scale. They are delivered as APIs to enable rapid innovation and reference apps as examples of how to build microcredit microsaving and digital financial service applications. We catalyze and enable upstream contribution to these digital public goods creating a virtuous cycle of a global community collectively maintaining the software. In 2024 we shipped the Mifos X 24.12 release in December which contained major new functional upstream contributions for improved configuration and rescheduling options for longer term loan products and services. These upstream contributions have additional testing coverage improved documentation and code refactoring to improve the quality and stability of the digital public good and overall developer experience for contributors increasing productivity. Our roadmap continues to prioritize modularity of the back-end to enable improved developer productivity and adoption across a wider range of inclusive financial services. We also launched a new product in December 2024 Mifos Gazelle which is a powerful deployment tool to educate and build awareness of digital public goods for financial inclusion by enabling governments and other adopters to rapidly install and configure the reference tools for evaluation and demonstration use cases. We completed enhancements to Payment Hub EE for bulk government to person G2P payments. Through our university intern programs we continued to refine the front-end and mobile apps for greater modularity and improved user experience for customer-facing activities. With Gazelle and these reference tools for the back-end front-end customers and payment orchestration we now have a full suite of digital public goods and an active upstream community to extend and maintain them. We continued participating in the Azure Credits for Open Source Projects for a fourth year to provide sandboxes to end users to evaluate and test our digital public goods for financial inclusion.Software Development Dev: Mifos X and Fineract are free & open source financial software developed to build the complete range of financial services required for effective financial inclusion at scale. They are delivered as APIs to enable rapid innovation and reference apps as examples of how to build microcredit microsaving and digital financial service applications. We catalyze and enable upstream contribution to these digital public goods creating a virtuous cycle of a global community collectively maintaining the software. In 2023 we shipped the Mifos X 23.12 release in December which contained significant upstream contributions providing greater scalability and support for greater precision and flexibility around lending and better tools for servicing customers. These upstream contributions have also yielded a brand new and more comprehensive test framework improving the quality and stability of the digital public good and overall developer experience for contributors increasing productivity. Within the Payment Hub EE our opensource payments orchestration software through our GovStack efforts we built in new functionalities around bulk processing of payments an Identity Account Mapping Service which is able to be adopted for use by the opensource community independently of PHEE and an improved user experience. By aligning Payment Hub EE we are enabling financial inclusion for citizens of governments adopting the software through a range of payment methods. Our class of Mifos and Google Summer of Code interns contributed in numerous ways around our web and mobile apps including the launch of Mojafos a tool for streamlining deployment of digital public goods for financial inclusion. We now have a strong suite of digital public goods and an active upstream community to extend and maintain them. We continued participating in the Azure Credits for Open Source Projects for a third year to provide sandboxes to end users to evaluate and test our digital public goods for financial inclusion.
- $623,696 spent. Community Development COMM: The global Mifos community is made up of financial institutions local technology partners and volunteers who use support and develop the software respectively. We provide the tools framework governance and infrastructure for global collaboration and conduct outreach & advocacy to reach new users recruit new partners and attract new volunteers. Our customer reach continued to grow with more than 65M clients reached by 500+ institutions. In 2024 we continued to establish a deeper presence within the digital public infrastructure movement as the digital public goods to enable reach to last-mile accounts for financial inclusion. In June 2024 we completed the implementation and delivery of the Payment Building Block for the GovStack Initiative. This was built on top of Payment Hub EE which was formally certified as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance in April 2024. We also completed a research grant with the Interledger Foundation in July 2024 to explore the alignment of Mifos DPGs and the Interledger technology and protocols for DPI use cases. In addition we continued playing a leadership role to explore DPG sustainability through the DPG4DPI workshops led by Co-Develop Fund. The launch of Mifos Gazelle provided a valuable tool to improve sustainability and accelerate adoption of DPI at a country level. We continued to highlight exemplar case studies across a variety of financial inclusion use cases to continue demonstrating our impact on financial inclusion and continued refining our ecosystem and partner program for better collaboration. We grew our participation significantly with intern programs participating in both Google Summer of Code and Code for Govtech graduating 17 interns helping to educate first-time contributors to open source with real-world use cases for financial inclusion with development across our web and mobile applications. We continue to systematize our engagement with volunteers including the launch of a documentation working group.
- $22,622 spent. Education EDU: The focal point of our messaging centers around Mifos as a steward of digital public goods for orchestrating payments and managing wallets and accounts enabling the delivery of inclusive financial services to last mile recipients. A common and continued theme of our advocacy and outreach across the numerous events we spoke at was interoperability of digital public goods the value of upstream contribution and the potential for scale and sustainability via shared infrastructure. We spoke and or attended more than ten events physically and virtually. In the realm of DPI we attended MOSIP Connect in Ethiopia ID4Africa in Cape Town the DPG4DPI Workshop in Cambridge the DPGA annual members meeting in Singapore and a number of virtual Mojaloop Convenings. We spoke at and hosted exhibition booths at Community over Code EU in Bratislava the inaugural Global DPI Summit in Cairo the Interledger Summit in Cape Town and the TrustTech Conference in Paris. On the fintech front we spoke at Fintech DevCon in Austin CamundaCon in NYC and attended the FINOS Open Source in Finance Forum in London and New York and the Accion Fintech for Global Inclusion Summit in London. To build our open source community further we attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit and participated in the Code for GovTech inauguration ceremony. We also began quarterly virtual community calls and hosted a number of virtual webinars including participation in the Financial Inclusion Week along with Begini. We also were shortlisted as a finalist for the 11:FS Fintech for Good Award. By speaking at these events we build awareness amongst the public and private sector of the availability of our open source digital public goods and building blocks and how the ecosystem can sustainability build inclusive financial services on top of them while contributing back upstream. This role of thought leadership allows us to identify new users of the software and build our ecosystem of volunteer and intern contributors as well as funders and donors in the space. Our aforementioned participation in GSOC and C4GT allows us to deeply educate new contributors on open source contribution to our social mission in a direct and hands-on manner with our mentors.
Source: Form 990 for the year ending December 31, 2024, filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Rating method 2026.2. How we rate
Legitimacy checks
Is it registered with the IRS? Passed.
Listed in the IRS master file of tax-exempt organizations as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
Source: Exempt Organizations Business Master File, Internal Revenue Service, file dated October 13, 2026.
Has the IRS revoked its tax-exempt status? Passed.
Not on the IRS automatic revocation list.
Source: Automatic revocation of exemption list, Internal Revenue Service, file dated October 13, 2026.
Are donations tax-deductible? Passed.
On the IRS list of organizations eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions.
Source: Publication 78 data: organizations eligible for tax-deductible contributions, Internal Revenue Service, file dated October 13, 2026.
Is it keeping up with its IRS filings? Passed.
Most recent return on file covers the year ending December 2024.
Source: Exempt Organizations Business Master File, Internal Revenue Service, file dated October 13, 2026.
How long has it been tax-exempt? Passed.
Recognized by the IRS since July 2013.
Source: Exempt Organizations Business Master File, Internal Revenue Service, file dated October 13, 2026.
Is it in good standing with state regulators? Passed.
Not on California's list of charities barred from soliciting. Other states are not yet checked.
Source: May Not Operate or Solicit for Charitable Purposes list, California Attorney General, Registry of Charities and Fundraisers, file dated October 21, 2026.
Ratings and checks are our reading of public records, using the published method. They are not a statement about anyone's honesty. If you work for this organization, you can send corrections or results, confirm you want gifts through Veridonate, or ask to be removed from giving.