Effectively serving low-income populations while growing a financially sustainable businesses is no easy task. If youre like most financial institutions, choosing technology platforms ? a major investment ? that enable rapid product innovation, minimize administrative overhead and grow with your business is a challenge.

Unlike other software providers, our solutions have been designed for three decades specifically for inclusive financial institutions. During this time, weve helped over 300 clients achieve better return on their software investment. Fern Softwares approach to working with our clients ensures that technology helps rather than hinders growth through solutions that are functional, flexible and easy to use: helping them to spend less time running their IT systems and more time growing their business and accomplishing their social and financial goals.

Whether you are a small credit union or a large development bank, we take pride in using a professional and yet personal implementation methodology that maximises knowledge transfer: making our solution work for you rather than the other way around, and providing you with the ability to quickly and easily change parameters or design new products as your business evolves.

Fern has been accredited by CGAP, international consultants Accenture and Ernst & Young, and several NGOs that have selected Fern Software as their provider of choice. In a recent audit of data quality USAID gave Fern Software the number one and two slots out of 16 selected systems.

History

In 1979 we started Fern Software to service the new microcomputer market with easy to use affordable software. Over the years, we have kept that ambition alive in the face of major technological revolutions and continually evolved and redesigned our solutions to match the new capabilities of hardware and software available. Fern is now an accredited leader in the provision of banking systems for credit unions, microfinance institutions, development banks, retail banks, mortgage providers and enterprise development agencies.

1979 ? Fern launches Credit Union and Banking Information System (CUBIS)
1992 ? CUBIS 3 for MS Windows launched
2004 ? Abacus Version 1.0 launched, and first client installed
2006: Ferns first national development bank and housing finance institution clients in PNG.
2007: Ferns first trans-national implementation for a single customer, covering Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan.
2008: Ferns first multi-currency and multi-language version for a client in Nicaragua. Second language introduced ? Spanish.
2009: Ferns largest microfinance client with 400,000 clients and nearly 100 branches, all with low bandwidth.
2010: Ferns first commercial bank, with over 10,000,000 transactions migrating from Oracle Flexcube system. Savings/current accounts plus ATM/POS, SMS alerts and mobile wallets.
2011: Ferns first hosted solution, with five clients in Indonesia hosted from partner in Jakarta. Third language introduced ? Indonesian.
2012: Ferns first Middle East client. Fourth language introduced ? Arabic. First Arabic client in Jordan.
2013: Ferns first client in Canada. FaaSBank ? CRM and Loans Processing system for SME financial and technical support. Enterprise development functionality with intuitive touchscreen and tiled navigation ? Canadian government funded organisation OACFDC.
2014: Fifth language introduced ? French. First client in Francophone Africa. First client who is entirely branchless and cashless, leveraging mobile channels.