IST (GMT +5:30)

Our AngularJS Web App is the standard application on the Mifos X distribution that provides all the core functionality for the most common methods of financial inclusion and products and services. It's also the starting point for any partners looking to customize or extend the UI. It's constantly being improved based on user feedback, better performance, and to integrate new design standards.

In 2016, our Google Summer of Code intern refactor, re-designed, and re-skinned the Web App. This project would continue by making additional UI enhancements including:

• Redesign the client, group, and center records
• Redesign the loan and summary savings pages
• Implement Wizard UI product and account creation
• Implement UI for workflows & data table entity checks
• Improve the collection sheet UI
• Extend the notifications framework
• Improve interface for role-based dashboards.Performance improvements by introducing on demand loading
  
  
  

For this project, we require an intern who is qualified and willing to work core HTML5 offline functionality. If we able to add offline support in community-app then we can have same application working on all browsers with offline support and need of a desktop app will not be needed.

The project will involve the following. It will be a continuation of the 2016 Google Summer of Code project worked on by Mohit.

• We can use IndexDB for storing data offline and once connected synchronize it, store actions that happened in same sequence and then fire against server.

• We can store some data in JSONs as key-value pair and offer pre-sychronize which will fetch data as JSON for creating clients and other actions in offline mode.

• Currently, HTML templates load from server everytime we refresh our application. As, discussed we should have some sort of template caching with expiry headers.

• We can make some template made available offline using application cache.

• With Template cache which is angular component. It looks for template in cache if not in the cache, it will load from server and then put in cache.

• Mimic synchronization back and forth mimic how you store, how you date it out.

We have released several versions of our Android app for field officers to go out in the field to process transactions, create clients, etc. Most recently in 2016, our Google Summer of Code intern refactored the entire application, implemented offline synchronization for clients and groups, and added improved functionalities for client onboarding, loan and savings collection, and GIS-based location tracking. All this work comprised Version 3.0 of the Android App

This project would continue that work and transform it into Version 4 - by extending offline synchronization and adding additional functionalities.

Allows staff to go directly into the field to connect to the client. Reduces cost of operations by enabling organizations to go paperless and be more efficient.

https://github.com/openMF/android-client

We have recently released a full set of client-facing APIs to enable self-service channels for clients to interact with their own data and transact in a self-service manner. Previously all Mifos operations were performed by back office staff. Now clients can authenticate themselves, view and edit their account details. and make repayments or transactions between their own accounts.

It is now possible for them to have direct banking apps that they can utilize including smartphone-based mobile banking, USSD-based mobile banking, and online banking via a web app.

Allows a member/client in having a self-service channel allowing them more direct control and visibility into their financial livelihood.

User Stories - https://goo.gl/3xuUko

Wireframes - https://goo.gl/3xuUko

Customer Self Service APIs - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Customer+Self-Service

Source Code: https://github.com/openMF/self-service-app

A crucial part of financial inclusion is micro-insurance and the ability for clients to safely manage risk in their lives. Mifos X will not fully handle the entire lifecycle of an insurance product but it should integrate with microinsurance system and track the key parts of the process that relate to the core banking system - collection and pass through of the premium and tracking claims and processing of these.

This project would involve building out a separate module that tracks claims being made by a client, likely leveraging the CRM functionality being build to track activities. It will integrate with APIs to enable processing of the claim and tracking what proceeds must be paid out to the client.

It will involve creating a new module with data model, UI screens and business logic that leverages Mifos X APIs

Tasks involved include:

1. Implementing a flag at the client level to denote if a person is deceased - if deceased, all loans would go into different status where all income, interest, fees, etc should stop accuringaccruing.
2. Utilize Data Tables to enable a user to initiate an insurance claim with details of the cliam claim and corresponding updates to follow up on the claims process. Must limit this data table only to the clients with the corresponding flag so it's not displayed for all clients.
3. Processing of Claims - the insurance claim can either go directly to the client or directly to the Financial Institution. If directly to the FI, the outstanding amonst should be offset by the claim - it could be automatically applied using a new different payment of insurance claim. Corresponding accounting entries need to get passed as well.
   1. If there is money to be refunded to customer, they must have a savings account as can''t like journal entry to customer directly.
4. Closing of Account - once claim has been processed and outstanding balance settled, should implement a different status such as Closed - Deceased or Closed - Via Insurance Claim

Clients are able to lower their risk and have a much larger safety net when they have affordable access to insurance policies.

See http://www.openunderwriter.com/

See Insurance Product

Because of regulatory reasons or to do background check of a client (risk management), MFIs depend on credit bureaus. As part of it, MFI must submit client details to credit bureau and also need to pull client information from credit bureau before approving any new loans to a client.Mifos X can be integrated with a popular CBs in India and from other regions (based on the demand).

During the 2016 Google Summer of Code, Nikhil Pawar, completed the credit bureau integration module with integrations for the major credit bureaus in India. This project will continue extending the functionality of the module and work on integrations with the major credit bureaus in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The major functionality will be sending the data to CBs on regular intervals in the format CB expects. And option to pull the client’s information from CB whenever loan officer/branch manager/ user wants to view the information for a particular client.

The credit report shows account information such as repayment record, defaults, type of loan, amount of loan, etc. of the customer. This information facilitates prudent decision-making when the credit underwriter processes the loan application. This help MFI to reduce the risk of bad loans and reduces the multiple lendings to same person from different MFIs.

Detailed requirements https://goo.gl/aZWMZa

Mifos Credit bureau Integration. (Risk calibration Module -RCM)

Source Code: https://github.com/apache/incubator-fineract/pull/215

Create a POC of a scalable MifosX implementation on OpenShift. Also publish a whitepaper with details of this set up.

Mifos X was built to be cloud ready from the ground up. One of the most popular deployment environments for MifosX has been on Amazon EC2, however due to country specific regulation, many implementors are forced to seek alternative models that can scale as effectively. The aim of this project is two-fold:

• Propose a scalable deployment model for Mifos on the OpenShift PaaS. Your application should highlight a starting point with some details of your planned deployment architecture, as Mentors would be not giving you step-by-step instructions in this project, just "nudge" you along; you would be expected to learn about how to deploy Mifos yourself and by autonomously using the documentation available and help from the public mailing list and IRC channel, and figure out the details of the Cloud deployment.

• Propose how the above proposed model could be contributed to Mifos in the form of e.g. ready-to-run "configurations" etc. allowing ANYONE to deploy THE LATEST VERSION of Mifos in the Cloud themselves, and then implement this approach in practice. (Contrast this with a "one-off exercise", e.g. taking the current Mifos X WAR file, and UI, and manually making some changes to it, and then manually deploying that to some Cloud PaaS - this would not be sufficient for this project's expectations.)

• Implement a Continuous Deployment "Devops" EXAMPLE instance of this scalable blueprint using the latest nightly Mifos build artifacts.

• Publish a high level whitepaper of the same, which can be used as a reference for local implementors, who would additionally take care of provisioning their own hardware. This documentation should be ideally high-level, and what it described much be automated; only providing lengthy step-by-step manual instructions would not be sufficient for this project's expectations.

To prepare for this project, applying students must demonstrate at least that they have already successfully locally built and ran a Mifos X REST back-end server and UI, populated the database etc. as well as provided a simple pull request proposing some minimal deployment related improvement.

Note that we now believe that a Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a more suitable foundation for this project than a raw Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform (such as Openstack, offered by public cloud provider such as e.g. Rackspace; or Azure, or raw Amazon EC2). This is because a PaaS, such OpenShift, already come with relevant features such as built-in, managed, supported and monitored HTTP load balancing (e.g. OpenShift comes with HAProxy).

We are aware that OpenShift out-of-the-box currently does not provide supported clustering for the MariaDB/mysql database used by Mifos (there is documentation for un-supported example based on an OpenShift template and suggested descriptions on blog posts, or also this one based on Severalnines.com; similarly one could deploy the commercial Percona XtraDB Cluster product ). However at this point we believe that this would not be required, and that proper configuration on OpenStack of the already existing cache facility (incl. distributed cache invalidation) available in Mifos X will add more value at signficantly less operational complexity.

You may need to develop some minor "adjustments" for Mifos X to work well in a PaaS. For example, writeable directories may be limited, and configuration changes may be needed to pick up allowed data directories from an environment variable configuration (but consider multi node distribution in this cluster setup!). Also a cloud PaaS like OpenShift may not support "always running" instances, and scheduled jobs may have to be configured to be kicked off via an explicit HTTP "wake up" request from a cron job.

While OpenShift should already take care of automatic distribution of Mifos code (WAR) updates among nodes in the cluster, you may also have to consider distributed configuration in a cluster. Normally all Mifos X configuration should reside 100% fully in the database only, and as such this may be a non-issue. If however there are any customized configuration files, then perhaps something like the Spring Cloud project could be of interest to ease distributed configuration management.

We are aware of other PaaS product similar to OpenShift, such as notably Cloud Foundry, or even Heroku (closed source..) but would suggest to use OpenShift.

OpenShift https://www.openshift.com

Old Mifos mailing list posts related to related things, search e.g. "mifos google app engine", and find as this one as well as this one.