Mifos Initiative 2014 Annual Report
Our Mission
To speed the elimination of poverty by coordinating a global community that builds, supports, and uses Mifos X, a free and open source platform that enables financial service providers to more effectively and efficiently deliver responsible financial services to the world’s 2 billion poor and unbanked.
Our Vision
We aim to create a world of 3 Billion Maries where each of the 2 billion poor and unbanked has access to the financial resources needed to create a better life for themselves and their family. 3 Billion Maries is the shared vision that unites our community and what the Mifos Initiative works towards each day.
3 Billion Maries
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Letter from the Executive Director 2014 marked a banner year for the Mifos Initiative as our partners and community took the Mifos X platform around the world, proving a platform-centric, partner-driven approach can achieve tremendous scale and impact. 2014 was our first full calendar year with the availability of both the Mifos X platform and the Community App and we demonstrated the viability of our platform and the enormous potential to build sustainable customer-facing solutions. Our community continues to grow with new users, partners, and volunteers joining at an increasing rate. Our installed base of financial institutions grew from 80 to 110. Now, more than 2.6M clients are being reached through financial institutions using Mifos.
Partners The partner model is essential to the growth and impact of Mifos. It is through the partners that Mifos is modified to meet local conditions and delivered to local financial institutions. In 2014, partners such as Musoni Services and Conflux Technologies proved the viability and impact of our global partner program. Musoni built Musoni System on top of the platform and deployed it across 15 financial institutions throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Conflux continues to expand its global reach with dedicated support and deployment of Mifos X in the cloud.
Software Development Mifos began with micro-lending but our goal has always been to provide a full solution for financial inclusion. In 2014, we focused on the other essential component of financial inclusion – savings. Dayna Harp, an experienced credit union executive, including eight years as the CEO of the White House CU, joined us full-time. With her guidance on user needs, we developed new features for savings, current accounts, and accrual accounting. These new features paid off as we now have a diverse base of financial institutions using the platform, ranging from traditional MFIs to SACCOs (Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations) to credit unions to SHGs (Self-Help Groups) to P2P (peer to peer) lenders.
Volunteers Dozens of volunteers dedicated countless hours to strengthen our initiative, contributing translations, writing our user manual, developing our Android app, and coding new features.
Looking Forward to 2015: Digital Financial Services As we look to the future, we’re excited where this powerful foundation will propel us. The next generation of financial services will be digital and we’re in the perfect position to catalyze new digital financial service solutions. Come be a part of our open source community in 2015.
Craig Chelius, Executive Director
Impact
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2.6 million total clients
served by 110 financial institutions supported by 40 local tech partners with contributions from 120 volunteers across 33 different countries.
80,000,000 transactions processed. $791,000,000 in loans managed.
Open Source We entered 2014 with several stable versions of the Mifos X platform released and a freshly launched Community App providing all the functionality needed to manage the group and individual lending operations of a traditional financial institution. We focused on enabling broader adoption worldwide by adding support for savings, financial cooperatives, and micro-insurance. Several partners have already successfully built their own apps via the API layer of our platform, so we have continued to make the platform more extensible so partners could easily connect to new delivery and communication channels. Our community released 10 new versions of the platform and reference apps from Release 1.16.0 to 1.26.0 including the launch of our Android app for mobile field operations. Our core team of developers leads architecture and design of the platform. They were able to significantly grow overall output by incorporating numerous technical contributions from external partners and volunteers. 6
2014 Milestones We delivered 10 releases of the Mifos X platform and community app. These software releases horizontally scaled to support an array of financial inclusion services and vertically scaled to support the more sophisticated needs of large financial institutions. Financial Services Product Management
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• Current Accounts w/ Overdrafts • Standing Instructions for Account Transfers • Fixed and Recurring Term Deposits • Housing Loans (multi-tranche) • Bulk Joint-Liability Group Loans • Automated Penalties, One-Time & Recurring Fees • Pure Declining Balance Interest Loans • Refunds for Active Loans Mobile Delivery and Enablement
• • • • •
Android Mobile Field Operations App SMS Gateway Integration SMS Module for Event-Based Messages SMS Module for Bulk Campaigns
Client Management
• • • • • • • •
New client lifecycle states and workflows PPI integration for East Africa Client photos from webcams and smartphones Client Signature Uploads Bulk Transfer of Groups and Clients Loan Guarantor Management Configurable Client and Account IDs Business Management
• • • • • •
Ishan Khanna
Accrual Accounting Support Teller Cash Management Productive Collection Sheet Password Expiration Policies Categorize Loans as Non-Performing Assets
Extensibility & Scalability
• • Code Hooks • Web Hooks
• Batch APIs • Performance Testing on Linux Power Stack
* Legend - Developed by: Core Team | Partners | Volunteers
All Mifos software is released and freely available, royalty-free, in perpetuity via the open source Mozilla Public License 2.0.
11,630 downloads from 150 countries 452 GitHub members
2015 Vision Since mid-2014, we have embarked on a slight but steady change in our product vision driven by new disruptive and innovative partners. Across the globe, enhancements to national regulations are encouraging and evening mandating a transition to digital financial services. To meet requirements for salary and government benefit payments to be digital, solid and open financial gateways are required, opening the door for nonbank organizations to offer digital financial services. To address this we have started to evolve our platform to become an application framework for digital financial services. This next generation will provide a unified interface for transaction processing, and even easier extensibility to build unique digital financial services solutions on top of the framework. For traditional financial institutions, we will continue to build out more advanced features and extend our cloud-based solution to scale out better and enable consumer self-provisioning.
Markus Geiss
Education As a thought leader on technology-enabled financial inclusion and the steward of our global community, we offer comprehensive education services targeted to our distinct audiences: • Customers - best practices to successfully incorporate technology into their operations and make the transition to digital financial services. • Partners - deployment of digital financial services and expert support on technology implementation, efficient business processes, product design, and business intelligence. • Developers - appropriate design for the base of the pyramid and developing user-driven solutions that are scalable yet affordable, accessible, and easily adopted. • Volunteers - awareness to the general public on the opportunity to volunteer and use cutting edge technology like cloud, mobile, and big data to reach base of the pyramid. 8
Training & Documentation
User Groups & Meetups
We provide a full range of services for financial institutions serving the poor to successfully adopt technology: 1) instructional materials to implement, configure, and use software, 2) best practices and process optimization to ensure operational practices align with technology intervention, and 3) support and collaboration tools.
We coordinate both online and offline meetups to enable collaboration, support, and knowledge sharing across our global community.
Volunteers from the British Columbia Institute of Technology completed our user manual for our Community App. They fully documented the end to end functionality and how to use each feature. We also expanded our end user and partner training offerings, launching formal online courses, video library, and a suite of training slides. Global financial cooperative sector volunteers developed our operational toolkit - a full set of operational policies, procedures, and sample forms so any organization operate under common best practices. This user manual and operational toolkit complement our existing deployment toolkits and technical wikis which provide a knowledgebase of resources on appropriately designing solutions for the base of the pyramid and writing code of missioncritical quality to go back into the platform. We launched MifosConnect and Live Chat to provide real-time support channels. These communications channels and support resources connect our entire community: • MifosConnect - social Q & A knowledgebase • LiveChat - live chatroom for real-time support • Mailing Lists - primary channel for communication
Each week we hold a community-wide online meetup via GoToTraining. In total, we hosted 50 User meetings and developer meetings are rotated every other Thursday providing a common time and place to discuss issues, brainstorm new ideas, share experiences and case studios, view tutorials, lead demos, and more. Local User Groups are volunteer-driven groups that promote technology-enabled financial inclusion and empower local communities to use, collaborate, build, and grow Mifos X together. User Groups connect local users, collaborate and support deployments, innovate new solutions and inspire contributions to our initiative. In 2014, we began the development of a network of local user groups with launches in San Francisco and Bangalore. Mifos User Groups are now also in formation in Dubai, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Philippines, and Seattle.
Events Each year we hold a Global Summit to bring together the key financial institutions, partners, and contributors in our community for training, networking, and to collectively plan the roadmap for the next year. This year our event was re-scheduled to early 2015 in Dubai with plans for more than 75 to attend with sponsorship from ThoughtWorks and Google.
Mifos Open House We formally unveiled the new Mifos X Platform in San Francisco on June 11, 2014 at an event hosted by Pivotal Labs titled, “Writing Code. Fighting Poverty. Global Launch of the Mifos Initiative”. The event was a huge success with more than 100 technologists and philanthropists from the Silicon Valley attending to learn how they could fight global poverty through the Mifos X platform.
Folio
Writing Code. Fighting Poverty.
Community Development At the heart of our initiative is our global Mifos community made up of financial institutions, local technology partners, and volunteers who use, support, and develop the platform. We provide the tools, frameworks, governance, and infrastructure for global collaboration and lead outreach to new users, partners, and volunteers. Our efforts provide not only a common platform for innovation, but a collaborative space for knowledge sharing and support. This approach of a vibrant ecosystem unified on one platform allows us to unlock the widespread adoption, collaboration, and innovation needed to create a world of 3 Billion Maries. In 2014, we focused on growing and formalizing our support ecosystem, leading outreach to new markets and platform players, and continuing to calibrate our distributed development model such that we can benefit from the leveraged contributions of external volunteers and partners contributing back to our virtuous cycle.
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Customer Adoption We’re scaling adoption by making the software more accessible for independent deployments, more feature-rich and extensible for partners, and more modular and scalable for the next generation of digital financial services.
Platform is Evolving
Community is growing
Now used by the following types of financial institutions: • Grameen Joint Liability Groups • SACCOs • Individual Lending • Cooperatives • Asset Financing Lenders • Credit Unions • Rotating Savings Groups • Payment Banks • Peer to Peer Lenders • Rural Banks • Self-Help Groups
We have our first-time customers in: • Laos • Zimbabwe • Cambodia • Belize • Myanmar • Pakistan • Morocco • Colombia • Haiti • Mauritius • Dominican Republic
Hana Microfinance is our first Mifos X deployment in Myanmar, led and supported by Conflux Technologies. Hana Microfinance’s mission is to alleviate poverty in Myanmar by providing affordable income generation microloans to rural and peri-urban microenterprises across a wide variety of industries, enabled by the latest in MIS and communications technology. They also provide demand & supply aggregation and linkage services through Business Development Services (BDS) activities to help reduce economic, information and logistical inefficiencies that currently pervade many micro-supply chains in Myanmar. After less than one year of operations, they have nearly 2,000 rural clients, engaging in micro-retail, agricultural, livestock, fishery and micro-manufacturing enterprises. Mifos affordably supports the key operational, financial, reporting and compliance functions required.
2.6 million clients 60 Mifos X deployments 50 Mifos 2.x deployments in 30 countries
Hana Microfinance - Myanmar
Support Ecosystem Our network of certified support partners provide unparalleled reach, depth of service, breadth of innovation, and knowledge of the customer - it allows us to grow exponentially by directly unleashing the power of a platform.
Visibility & Presence in the Local Market
Local Support
Partners are the direct channel to our users – they’re the champions of our platform promoting it to new markets. As the eyes and ears of our customers, they communicate back to the community requirements and critical direct user feedback to help our platform grow and respond to the needs of the poor.
One of the biggest challenges our users face is access to high-quality affordable local support - we aim to have a certified partner in every region. Our platform gives partners the opportunity to reach these markets and the flexibility to localize the product to regionspecific requirements and regulations.
Virtuous Cycle of Innovation
Local Job Creation
The product of our ecosystem’s efforts is greater than the sum of its parts. Partners building on the platform pay it forward by contributing back the features and enhancements they build for their customers. This contribution is a significant part of our product roadmap. Innovation shared with the community is collectively supported, improved, and maintained for everyone to benefit.
Most partners are small, young startups driven by our social mission and eager to give back to their local community. They employ numerous full-time employees skilled in IT who often would move away to find work. Our partners and the IT jobs they create have a direct social and economic impact on their broader community.
Deployment Partners Deployment Partners distribute and deploy the core Mifos X platform and the official community app for their region, delivering a range of services to ensure Mifos X meets the end-to-end needs of their customers. They fully implement the software and train staff, provide hosting & support in the cloud or on-site, conduct additional consulting services like Social Performance Management, and develop new features, modules & custom reports.
Conflux Technologies is one of our most experienced gold-certified deployment and development partners. Conflux is a company of young Indians who left their software development jobs in the private technology sector in 2009 to launch their own company supporting Mifos. They saw the overwhelming challenges to use technology and realized they could dramatically improve the ability of financial institutions to serve the poor. Conflux Technologies now supports two dozen institutions throughout India, SE Asia, and East and West Africa in the cloud. Conflux stands out due to their willingness to contribute new innovations to the community and their tireless support to users, providing them a high level of support tailored to their needs. Apart from excellence in supporting customers, they’re our most senior development resource, with members working on our core team and building out major features for other partners. Conflux is a shining example of a team player in the community. They never hesitate to share their knowledge and tools with the rest of the community. 12 They’ve contributed to the core and built new modules, migration tools, and training & documentation.
Certification & Governance
Partner Growth and Development
We launched our formal certification program offering four tiers of partners based on activity and achievement in the community. We certified 23 existing partners and onboarded 20 brand new partners. Customers can now conveniently find trusted partners in our online directory where existing partners can distinguish themselves, and new partners have a clear path towards maturity.
Presiding over our global partner ecosystem, we recruit and educate new partners in each region, helping to localize our software. We welcomed partners from 8 new countries and 4 continents. We connect them with potential customers, lead global outreach and strategic partnerships, and help develop new business models driving towards sustainability and impact.
Partner Council
Technical Support & Training
We established our formal advisory council to the Mifos staff and board made up our gold certified partners. They advise on the product roadmap and growth and development of the partner program and help to draft and review our annual roadmap, partner program, and governance and code of conduct policies.
We made the platform more extensible through our web hooks framework and provided better data migration tools for partners to independently extend the software to meet user needs. This complements the documentation and formal online training and tutorials covering technical, functional, and deployment topics.
33 certified deployment partners Partners in 8 new countries 10 certified platform partners 12 major new features Platform Solution Partners Bearing the “powered by Mifos� insignia, platform partners leverage core components of the Mifos X financial service engine as a platform to build their own unique solutions via our APIs. Our Mozilla Public License gives partners the opportunity to bring to market full solutions, custom apps, and third party product integrations while contributing back common features to the core. This program fuels new innovation and is a catalyst for digital financial services.
Looking to replicate the operational excellence pioneered at Musoni Kenya, the world’s first cashless and paperless financial institution, Musoni Services turned to the Mifos X platform and open source business model. They wanted to scale their bestpractice breed of financial inclusion throughout all of Sub-Saharan Africa, but were limited by their existing stack of proprietary systems. In three months with a small team of developers, they built their entire Musoni System on top of the Mifos X platform via the APIs. Their customized application providing specialized workflows, real-time dashboards, and tight integration with mobile money platforms has been a huge market success. They have distributed and deployed Musoni System at fifteen financial institutions in 2014. Hosted in the cloud, their customers benefit from ongoing upgrades to Musoni System and mobility in the field through offline tablet-based devices. Musoni Services embodies the virtuous cycle we enable amongst our partners by sharing their operational expertise with the community and dedicating full-time developers who contribute back to the core platform that is so essential to their mission.
Built and brought to market their own best-practice financial inclusion solution, Musoni System, on the Mifos X platform. Deployed at 15 financial institutions throughout Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014.
Volunteers Volunteers touch every facet of our initiative from the software to documentation to outreach. Our impact is magnified by connecting talented individuals and corporate volunteers from around the world with tangible ways to help technology scale financial inclusion. Individual Volunteers
Google Summer of Code
Hacking for Humanity
We welcome all individual seeking to share their talents. We maintain a large queue of technical and non-technical projects and tasks. We work diligently to onboard new contributors whether they’re here for an hour or months at a time.
We participated in Google Summer of Code (GSOC) for our second straight year, successfully graduating seven university-level interns from all across the globe. GSOC is a program that unites our entire community by pairing our experienced community members as mentors shepherding in first-time contributors to open source. Not only do we build out the next generation of long-term contributors to our community, we release high-value features that directly meet the needs of our poor clients.
Through partnering with Social Coding 4 Good, we led several hackathons, day-long events, in which we facilitate engineers in tackling problems we present to them on our codebase. It is a great way to get contributions but most importantly educate high-tech engineers on the opportunity to contribute to HFOSS.
Volunteers had a sizable impact in 2014 by creating our user manual, building new features, designing the user interface, translating the community app, evangelizing the project, and more.
65 volunteers 5305 hours
Our seven interns from India, Sri Lanka, Georgia, and the USA built out impressive features including our Android mobile field operations app, extensive usability enhancements to our Community App, improved performance for bulk processing, improvements to our data import tool, and prototypes for clean energy, client impact, and ad-hoc reporting solutions.
This year we led hackathons at GoogleServe, LinkedIn Day for Good and an Android Boot Camp.
We also participated in Google Code-In for the first time working with 53 high school students contributing 675 hours.
Strategic Partners Originating out of the Silicon Valley, we maintain a tight bond with technology giants who help us strengthen our platform through the time and talent of individual volunteers. Our Social Coding 4 Good partnership connects us with volunteers participating in day-long hackathons up to 3-month long sabbaticals.
Ishan joined our community as a Google Summer of Code intern in May of 2014. He became one of our most rock-solid contributors and community members. He represents what we seek in each volunteer - bold, confident leaders who are passionate about sharing their talents to fight poverty. As a GSOC intern, he single-handedly built our Android app for financial inclusion field operations. Since finishing his internship, his leadership and drive has set him apart. He has continued as the maintainer for our Android codebase, served as a mentor for GCI, facilitated hackathons during GoogleServe, and passionately evangelized our project at universities throughout India. His skills as a developer are matched by his confidence, enthusiasm, and patience to take on any project and motivate others.
“The idea behind Mifos Initiative has intrigued me a lot. Guidance from mentors 14 in the community has helped me become a better developer. Volunteering at Mifos Initiative, I have started to care about my code’s quality more than its behavior.”
Ishan Khanna
Outreach To fuel the continued growth of our community and strike deeper bonds amongst its members we attend and speak at events and form industry-wide partnerships to reach new users, connect with new partners, and discover new volunteers.
Global Financial Cooperative Initiative
Industry Collaboration
We launched a cross-cutting initiative across all of our programs to ensure Mifos X could fully support the needs of global financial cooperatives worldwide. Our open source DNA and financial inclusion roots philosophically align with the cooperative ideals of collaboration and collective ownership. Tens of thousands of cooperatives worldwide are a powerful way to reach the unbanked. Under the helm of seasoned credit union executive, Dayna Harp, we’re building awareness amongst the sector, evolving the platform to support all requirements, developing operational best practices, and providing our partners with the tools to deploy to financial cooperatives and savings-led institutions effectively.
Events We Attended
As an industry thought-leader for technology-enabled financial inclusion, we partner with other financial inclusion experts where technology intersects with responsible financial services, client protectionism, social performance management, transparency, data standards, and more. We worked with the Grameen Foundation, Smart Campaign, and MFTransparency.
By speaking at global industry events across the open source, financial inclusion, and fintech sectors, we build awareness of the common infrastructure for digital financial inclusion we’re building and the opportunity to use, support, and contribute to it. • OSCON - Global Open Source Convention • Community Leadership Summit • LinuxFest Northwest • Olliance OS Thinktank • FinDEVr San Francisco • Global Islamic Microfinance Conference • GSOC 10 Year Reunion
Mifos at OSCON 2014
Financial Summary Here is a financial summary for the Mifos Initiative for our 2014 fiscal year ending on December 31, 2014.
6.6%
Program Expenses Product Development Community Development Education
$153,374.39 $153,887.75 $21,809.97
Totals
$329,072.11
Program Efficiency Program Expenses $329,072.11 Management & General Expenses $51,381.83 Fundraising $0 Totals
46.8%
46.6%
13.5%
$380,453.94 86.5%
Program/Total Expenditures
86.5%
Statement of Financial Position ASSETS Total Current Assets TOTAL ASSETS LIABILITIES AND EQUITY Liabilities Total Current Liabilities Total Liabilities Equity Retained Earnings Net Income Total Equity
$202,074.57 $202,074.57
$6,707.07 $6,707.07 $550,806.56 - 355,439.06 $195,367.50
TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY $202,074.57
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Mifos Initiative is approved by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501 (C) (3) tax-exempt organization, and all donations are tax deductible to the extent provided by law. The Mifos Initiative’s Federal Identification Number (EIN) is 45-3613178.
Board of Directors Paul Maritz, Chair Zaheda Bhorat Edward Cable Craig Chelius James Dailey Suresh Krishna Dave Neary
Craig Chelius, Executive Director Edward Cable, Director of Community Programs Dayna Harp, Director of Strategic Initiatives Vishwas Babu, Chief Community Engineer Binny Gopinath Sreevas, Global Product Manager
Deployment Partners Conflux Technologies Hewe Hugo Technologies Intrasoft Technologies VasTech Solutions SolDevelo FINA Resilient Business Systems GoIT Solutions R116 Solutions Pison Solutions Miagstan Hakilisoft MicrobizOne San Jose Solutions Swordfish Technologies
Executive Staff
Skyburg Systems Ambrose Consulting Open Solutions Turina Solutions iSystemes GCAD Consulting Eazywiz Solutions KKD Consulting Anakut Solutions Just Chill Skooli Labs Info HandyTech Latent Software and Informatics TechCeFaCos bMost
Platform Partners Musoni Services Quipu Technologies Corent Technologies $ERO IDRBT Coders Trust Ovamba Solutions Software Group MTG Capital InVenture
Volunteers & Contributors Nayan Ambali Sander van der Heyden Vishwas Babu Pramod Nuthakki Avik Ganguly Markus Geiss Michael Vorburger Ishan Khanna Gaurav Saini Rishabh Shukla Channa Gayan Antonio Carella Oleg Dolidze Diunuge Buddhika Laurie Wilmot Ashok Auty
Binny Gopinath Sughosh Bharadwaj Subramanya S N Maduhkar Lingala Sangamesh N Terence Monteiro Mike Okeleke Prashant Mahajan Marius Seritan Chandrika Mohith Kaxa Gelashvili Sam Art Nut Satish Sajjan Shashvat Tripathi Harry Glasgow Siebrand Mazeland
Mohammed Nafees Sanjay Ravindra Alex Ivanov Mariusz Obajtek Kaloyan Nikov Gabe Brown Parker Thornton Gabriel Esteban Kevin Kuo Manthan Anthony Liu Varun Nayar Hydra Nathan Leung Alia ElKattan Stephen Tian
Lars Meiendresch Nicolas Colaizzi Nigel Poh Jun Kai Niharika Kapoor Vlad Negru Kavita Guliani Ben Lindahl Mithun Kashyap Nagaraj Reddy Chris Dalzell Christy Ninan Craig Scharien Helen McLaughlin Mithun Kashyap Nagaraj Reddy Emmanual Nnaa
Take Action
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Join our Community!
In 2014 we made tremendous strides together as a community building out the world’s most open and innovative platform for financial inclusion. The future only shines brighter as digital financial inclusion takes hold. We invite you to be a part of creating a World of 3 Billion Maries. Join us and be part of a groundbreaking movement that is using the reach of community, the power of platforms to bring universal financial access to all. Our initiative is only as strong as our community and we welcome all-comers. Please follow the steps below to get involved.
Use the software Download the Software or Sign up for a Trial in the Cloud at: mifos.org/take-action/get-mifos
Volunteer Discover the ways you can become involved with our community or be an advisor at: mifos.org/take-action/volunteer
Make a Donation
Become a Partner Support financial inclusion in your region and apply to become a partner at: mifos.org/take-action/partners
Make a tax-deductible one-time or recurring donation at: mifos.org/take-action/donate
Build a solution
Start a Chapter
Build your own digital financial inclusion solution on top of our platform: mifos.org/mifos-initiative/common-platform
Start a local chapter and grow the Mifos presence in your community. mifos.org/take-action/start-chapter
Tell our Story facebook.com/mifos
youtube.com/mifostech
mifos.org/newsletter
twitter.com/mifos
linkedin.com/company/mifos
mifos.org/blog
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