All - Today was the Fineract/Fintech Track. Adam Saghy was this year's Track Chair, and we had a full day of content. Having run the Track in year's past I know how much work is involved, so a big thank you to Adam.
My day started with the Keynote speaker Marenza Altieri-Douglas VP from Cloudera, who described the importance of Data and hosting sovereignty under EU laws. https://communityovercode.apache.org/events/glasgow-2026/ <https://communityovercode.apache.org/events/glasgow-2026/> This year, thanks to the ASF and our video recording sponsor AWS, we anticipate being able to share the session recordings and presentations. We will announce when they are available. 1. Carl Johann Larsson from Velmie joined me (James) in a session observing how AI is reshaping fintechs and the overlap with open source. We described the potential future directions. 2. Adam Saghy, Alexandar Vidakovic and Jarek Potiuk (I facilitated) had a great discussion about using AI in reality and how to think about our next steps into this brave new world. The key take away for me is that we're still developing our understanding of AI and this is analogous to the Gutenberg moment when Copyright law was first written. 3. Adam presented the 2025 to 2026 progress on the platform - digging into the FSIPs and describing 134 humans involved in providing over 1,200 Pull Requests. "We have an active community". 4. I presented EMI built on top of Fineract, and got into the success of our customer by building around Fineract with payments, onboarding, fees, and so on. 5. Robert from Fiter described several key lessons for selling to and deploying Fineract solutions for banks. These included: "Unlike every other Apache project, Boards make the decision to use Fineract" (the others are engineering teams), Cost savings opened the door, and ownership is why they stayed, and "make it cheap to test" for the customer. 6. Aleksandar Vidakovic covered the modularity of Fineract and provided a deep dive into how the current situation requires all new developers to touch many parts of the system, making it harder that it should be. He finished with an "in situ" re-writing strategy. 7. Adam Saghy described how to configure a number of loan types - featuring multiple disbursements, all under the progressive loan concept, and repayment flexibility. A big thanks to everyone who attended and presented. Thank you to Adam for leading us this year. Thanks,
