# History and Background The Mifos Initiative is a global 501(c)3 fintech non-profit leveraging the cloud, mobile & open source community to democratize financial services worldwide and digitally transform the world’s 3 billion poor and underbanked. Mifos has pioneered open-source banking technology for the past fifteen years transforming the entire sector at each major stage of evolution from microfinance to financial inclusion to digital financial services and now embedded finance. Mifos guides the open-source community, steers the roadmap, and stewards the vibrant ecosystem of organizations building solutions on its open platform. Their building blocks for banking, recognized as digital public goods, make core banking commoditized infrastructure, empowering any organization, anywhere to embed any financial service to any customer via any channel. These building blocks provide the common functionalities for creating customers, managing wallets, savings, and loan accounts, orchestrating payments, and maintaining the financial ledger & reports. More than 20 million clients are reached by 500+ financial institutions across 41 countries using solutions powered by its APIs. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.mifos.org/overview-and-background/history-and-background.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.