Microfinance institutions usually work with various external parties, such as funders or investors. Using the data that is available in MifosX we would like to offer those stakeholders a seperate portal showing accurate and high-level information about the institution that would otherwise be reported manually by the institution. This information helps them in their decision making processes, but also enables them to assess the broader impact they are having with their funding.

To develop a portal that aggregates information from different Mifos X deployments and report on predefined social and operational metrics

Objectives:

• Implement back-end logic in MifosX required to make information available to the client impact portal
• Implement UI and back-end logic of the Client impact portal

Data Analytics & Client Insight - Are we making an impact? (Client Impact Portal demo)

Client Impact Portal POC - (mifos/password are login credentials)

1. Create a pre-paid account mechanism as an account type or account option in Mifos (perhaps extending existing classes), zero fees.
2. Create a new API for consuming pre-paid account balances.  
3. Create a simple external model that mimics consumption by a household on a daily basis - imagined as a set of data received from solar panel (watts used, time of day, volts present).  
4. Load up pre-paid account by account transfer in P2P interface (my phone to your account) or via trusted agent - i.e. trusted agent receives cash and loads account on Mifos.

Providers of pay-as-you-go solar can use MIFOS for their operations. MFIs can become such providers.

A business rule system enables these financial institutes policies and other operational decisions to be defined, tested, executed. Rule engines typically support rules, facts, priority (score), mutual exclusion, preconditions, and other functions.

This module will enable MFI admin to add, remove or modify the business rule against pre-defined work flows in the application.

As financial institutes, the business process of the institute is governed by local regulatory, and internal rules and rules defined by other other stake holders. And MIS should have provision to define these rules in the application to achive the objectives of these rules defined by various stake holders.

Example: Insurance company does not provider insurance to any person above 65 age. In that case in the MIS if users tries to attach a insurance feed to a client's loan account whos age is more than 65 years then "business rule engine" should prevent that action with appropriate message.

At present MIfos X platform is shipped with Community-App (SPA) as default UI, but initial load time of the application high. And for users on narrow bandwidth internet it takes a considerable amount of time to load the app.

Instead of loading the app every time, we can convert the Community-App into a Chrome App and user can download them once and install it ion the machine, and it can used as thick client.

Community-App is completely developed on top of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. And Chrome apps are also written in same stack. Using grunt we should be able to repackage Community-App(SPA) into Community-App(Chrome App)

Users with slow internet connectivity can use this app (Installed on the machine) instead of loading Community-App (SPA) on the browser. Users will also have a continually updated app. This will also allow MFIs to potentially use Chromebooks as field-based devices for their branches.

MIfos X platform is shipped with a Community-App (SPA) as the default UI which is optimized for Web Browser display on large screens (Mobile, Laptops and Tablets). We need to extend the same to support mobile views (with minor changes to workflow) and provide offline functionality

Community-App is completely developed on top of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Also since there is a clear separation between the view and the Controllers in Angular JS, we should be able to spin up mobile views fairly easily reusing the same Controllers and Services. As it is quite common for Mobile users to have intermittent data connection, we should also support offline functionality,

Field officers can access MifosX from a Mobile optimized view, capture data offline that can be synced back to the server when an internet connection is available.

It also becomes easier for the community volunteers to maintain the mobile view ( as we reuse most of the code from the Community app) as opposed to maintaining a separate Android app.

Other Resources

Adding the ability to batch requests similar to the one at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/making-multiple-requests/ would greatly improve the performance and ease of consumption of MifosX Api's in apps that require bulk processing, syncing of offline data etc

Some of the simplest use cases would involve

a) Disbursing Multiple JLG loans in a center on a given meeting day

b) A flexible collection sheet, where we could query for all loans that have a scheduled repayment on a particular day, update the actual repayments and post the data back to the platform

c) Batch operations like approving multiple checker requests at a time

Abstract

Batching allows you to pass instructions for several operations in a single HTTP request.

The Batch API takes in an array of logical HTTP requests represented as JSON arrays - each request has a requestId (the id of a request used to specify the sequence and as a dependency between requests), a method (corresponding to HTTP method GET/PUT/POST/DELETE etc.), a relativeUrl (the portion of the URL after https://DomainName/api/v1), optional headers array (corresponding to HTTP headers) and an optional body (for POST and PUT requests).

The Batch API returns an array of logical HTTP responses represented as JSON arrays - each response has a requestId, a status code, an optional headers array and an optional body (which is a JSON encoded string).

First Step & POC

The workflow of an agent acting in the field will be used as a POC.

For the first step we should focus on the following use stories:

• As an agent I want to create a new client for an existing office.

• As an agent I want to update client specific information for an existing office.

• As an agent I want to apply a loan to an existing client.

• As an agent I want to apply a savings to an existing client.

• As an agent I want to collect client charges for a loan.

It should be feasible to implement all this by using existing commands. This solution will include dependency resolution, e.g. adding a new client and apply a new loan.

Definition

POST https://DomainName/api/v1

[
  {
    "requestId" : 1,
    "method" : "POST",
    "relativeUrl" : "clients",
    "body" : "{ \"officeId\": 1, \"firstname\": \"John\", \"lastname\": \"Smith\", ... }"
  },
  { "requestId" : 2,
    "method" : "POST",
    "relativeUrl" : "loans",
    "body" : "{ \"clientId\" : \"{1:$data$.clientId}\", \"productId\" : 1, ...}"
  },
  {
    "requestId" : 3,
    "method" : "POST",
    "relativeUrl" : "clients",
    "body" : "{ \"officeId\": 1, \"fullname\": \"Pocahontas\", ... }"
  },
  {
    "requestId" : 4,
    "method" : "POST",
    "relativeUrl" : "savingsaccount",
    "body" : "{ \"clientId\" : \"{3:$data$.clientId}\", \"productId\" : 1, ...}"
  }
]

[
  {
    "requestId" : 1,
    "statusCode" : 201,
    "headers" : [
      {
        "name" : "Content-Type",
        "value" : "application/json; charset=UTF-8"
      }
    ], 
    "body" : "{ \"officeId\": 1, \"clientId\": 1, ...}"
  },
  {
    "requestId" : 2,
    "statusCode" : 201,
    "headers" : [
      {
        "name" : "Content-Type",
        "value" : "application/json; charset=UTF-8"
      }
    ],
    "body" : "{ \"officeId\": 1, \"clientId\": 1, \"loanId\": 1, ...}"
  },
  {
    "requestId" : 3,
    "statusCode" : 201,
    "headers" : [
      {
        "name" : "Content-Type",
        "value" : "application/json; charset=UTF-8"
      }
    ],
    "body" : "{ \"officeId\": 1, \"clientId\": 2, ...}"
  },
  {
    "requestId" : 4,
    "statusCode" : 201,
    "headers" : [
      {
        "name" : "Content-Type",
        "value" : "application/json; charset=UTF-8"
      }
    ],
    "body" : "{ \"officeId\": 1, \"clientId\": 2, \"savingsId\": 1, ...}"
  }
]