Mambu Blog.

There’s little doubt that Mambu 2.0 was our biggest and most challenging release since launch and not without some hiccups. The team’s been hard at work at both resolving bugs as well as adding a slew of new features and improvements to the Mambu 2.1 release. Let’s look at a few of the highlights from this release.

With customizable labels organizations can now completely customized what different concepts are called to connect it with how they call everything internally. Are branches ‘offices’? Or credit officers ‘sales executives’? Or perhaps clients are actually organization ‘members’? All of this can be easily customized for your entire Mambu account.

Continuing with giving organizations the most flexibility, users can now choose which indicators they see on their dashboard. From seeing their PAR or their client count the dashboard gives a quick at-a-glance overview of the state of the organization or branch: customizable for every individual user.

Mambu 2.1 also now moves the lending parameters to the product level giving organizations far more choice and power in how they set up different loan product and more flexibility in working with existing and new products over their lifetime.

For organizations working closely with a traditional branch-based approach, we’ve added holidays at the branch level to make sure your repayment schedules fully reflect when you’re available.

Institutions now can also collect and backdate deposits & withdrawals – giving them the full power they need when offering savings services in the field.

Numerous other improvements in this release include:

• Sorted and paginated loan and savings transactions tables
• Receipt placeholders for principal, interest, fee & penalty amount
• Improved reporting table views with more details and column-sorting
• Allowing for specifying the repayment frequencies on the account-level
• Configurable arrears date calculation methodology
• Allowing for import of check box custom field types
• Explicitly logging interest applied transactions
• Showing index and interest spread in loan account overviews

We’re thrilled to be announcing today the release of Mambu 2.0, to be available for all organizations in the next few days. After two months of hard work, the team has vastly improved the core of Mambu allowing it to be faster and more flexible, to support a wide range of new loan product types and to add over 50 new features and improvements while fixing some bugs. A lot of the changes are really at the core of Mambu – like putting in a new car engine – and their impact will be seen in the vast new capabilities coming out in the coming year. Let’s take a look at a few of the major new features and improvements in this release.

Pre-Defined & Automated fees
A much-requested feature is at last here, with the ability for administrators to define a set of fees for loan and deposit products. Fees may be flat amounts, or percentages and may even be automatically triggered on events like disbursals or repayments going late. Of course, you can always still allow for applying arbitrary fees whenever needed.

Index Interest Rates
Some organizations fix their interest rate to a standard, and Index Interest rates let them define a spread and update the base. For instance, the government may define a base rate, and organizations apply a spread on top of this. As the base rate changes all loan accounts are updated to reflect the new interest rates based on their review cycles. Mambu’s Index Interest Rates support this capability and open up the door for a whole new set of loan products.

Accounts Summary
For clients with multiple accounts, you can now get an at-a-glance view of their standing: the loans they have, their deposit accounts as well as any pending applications.

Line of Credit
To increase the level of control of lending, issuing a line of credit to a client allows you to set their individual limits for loan amounts.

Some of the many other noteworthy improvements include:

• 360-Day Interest Rates
• Interest Only Grace Periods
• Reducing Number of Repayments on Prepayment
• First Payment Date for Declining Balnace Loans
• Deactivation of Users
• Account-Based Repayment Collections
• Ordering of Custom Fields
• Checkbox Custom Field Type
• New Repayments Schedule Table Representation
• User-Defined Branch IDs
• Get Journal Entries API
• Get Loan Accounts API
• Get Deposit Accounts API
• Get Users API
• Get Branches API

Finishing off a 2011 year which had not only the public launch of Mambu in May, but also 12 major releases continuously improving Mambu and introducing new features to better serve our existing customers and to open up our platform for different organizations all over the world. The latest release introduces a few major new features to improve internal controls, reduce fraud and improve the quality of the data entered into Mambu.

Client state management introduces the same concepts which existed for accounts into the client workflow. Clients may now require approval before they can be issued accounts or added to groups, explicitly blacklisted to prevent future disbursements or simply exited to track their progress and monitor client retention. Clients are also now explicitly set as active or inactive depending on their accounts, so you can easily find and report on those who aren’t using the services anymore.

Detailed field change logging captures all the individual field changes for almost any object in the system. Whenever a client’s phone number is added, an account limit lifted, an address changed or a custom field modified, Mambu will record who made the change and when. This allows you to easily audit every single change to any object since their creation and also quickly see, for example, past mobile numbers or previous account notes. You’ll see the detailed changes appear in the activity feeds for clients, groups, products and accounts.

Mobile repayment entry at last brings the functionality of credit officers easily capturing client repayments on their mobile phone using Mambu Mobile. Credit officers get a quick view of all repayments that are due just for their clients and can quickly capture the data with just a few clicks. Going mobile gives your credit officers the data they need in the field and reports repayment data back to branch and head office in real time.

Two-factor authentication gives you another layer of security by optionally requiring that users also specify a phone number and, on log-in enter a short random code which they receive from Mambu via SMS. This improves security by relying on two factors for every access to the system: something the user knows (his username & password) as well as something the user has (his mobile phone). This process provides an extra layer of online security beyond merely a username and password and can be used in any country with any mobile phone.

Identification document templates improve the quality of your data and reduce user error when creating or editing clients. Simply set up Mambu with all the documents you accept along with a template for ID format and define if they are optional or required for clients. We’ll make sure the data is correctly entered and formatted when creating or editing these clients.

A few other minor improvements and new features in this release include

• Configurable Columns in Transactions Lookup
• Optional Totals Rows in List Views
• Numeric Custom Field Type
• Log Activity for Re-Assignment of Branches, Centres & Credit Officers
• Automatic Formatting of Numeric Inputs
• Allow Specifying if Pre-Payments are Allowed for a Product
• Middle Names for Clients
• Search Client By Their ID Document Number
• Logging Excel Data Import Errors