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The Mifos Initiative has been acccepted as a mentoring org for GSOC 2023.

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Mentors

Naman Dwivedi Shivansh TiwariKarim Jindani

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Mobile, Exploratory

Overview & Objectives

Across our ecosystem we're seeing more and more adoption and innovation from fintechs. A huge democratizing force across the financial services sector is the Open Banking movement providing Open Banking APIs to enable third parties to directly interact with customers of financial institutions. We have recently started providing an Open Banking API layer that will allow financial institutions using Mifos and Fineract to offer third parties access to requesting account information and initiating payments via these APIs. Most recently the Mojaloop community, led by Google, has led the development of a centralized PISP API

To demonstrate these Open Banking APIs and use cases that third parties and fintechs can provide we have developed a cross-platform reference mobile app on Kotlin to showcase a number of these features. It currently connects with the Open Bank Project that adheres to the UK Open Banking API standard. The API Gateway to connect to is still being chosen (WS02, Gravitee, etc.)

The breadth and variety of apps that could be built leveraging these APIs from region to region is endless. We would like this app to be built in an extensible and modular fashion such that core libraries and components could be re-used across different use cases with this framework as the foundation and multiple reference apps on top. Applications include personal financial management apps aggregating information from multiple bank accounts in one place, wallet apps allowing payments to be made from different banks, lending apps, leveraging data and insight from multiple accounts, savings apps, etc.

Description

Intern would work on refining the initial architecture of the framework, the UI and user experience, core use cases including customer authentication and onboarding that was implemented in 2020 and integrating with the Fineract Open Banking APIs and Mojaloop PISP APIs to demonstrate use cases around account information request and payment initiation. 

This would be a continuation of the project worked on a couple year’s back but essentially the idea is the same to have a stand-alone reference third party fintech app that demonstrates 3rd party initiation/ Open Banking APIs so the app itself would need its own separate user managment, etc but then it would pull in data by authorizing consnet via open banking api to pull in transactional data from a mifos/fineract account (could extend exiting open banking adapter and map additional fineract apis to UK open banking api standard and most importantly we’d want to use this reference fintech app to demonstrate the use of Mojaloop/Google 3PPI PISP APIs whereby a user could authorize and establish consent across any bank participating in a mojaloop switch to the fintech to initiate transactions through mojaloop via their accounts managed in Mifos/Fineract

  • Aggregating account information across multiple banks/financial institution

  • Initiating payments across multiple financial institutions

  • Integrate with additional Fineract Open Banking APIs

  • Integrate with Mojaloop PISP APIs. 

  • Leverage completed components of UI library

Helpful Skills

Android development, SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Spring, OpenJPA, Rest, Kotlin

Impact

By providing an extensible open banking fintech app framework, allow partners a complete stack of Open Banking APIs and reference front-end application to rapidly build innovation via Open Banking APIs.   

Other Resources

2020 Progress: https://gist.github.com/ankurs287/4ef7c3de462073bf36bd5247479cb176

Google Whitepaper on 3PPI: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/nextbillionusers.google/en//tools/3PPI-2021-whitepaper.pdf

UK Open Banking API Standard: https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/

Open Banking Developer Zone: https://openbanking.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DZ/overview

Examples of Open Banking Apps: https://www.ft.com/content/a5f0af78-133e-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e

See https://openmf.github.io/mobileapps.github.io/

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Mentors

Naman Dwivedi Avik Ganguly Paras Dhama

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Mobile/Platform

Overview & Objectives

Across our ecosystem we're seeing more and more adoption and innovation from fintechs. A huge democratizing force across the financial services sector is the Open Banking movement providing Open Banking APIs to enable third parties to directly interact with customers of financial institutions. We have recently started providing an Open Banking API layer that will allow financial institutions using Mifos and Fineract to offer third parties access to requesting account information and initiating payments via these APIs. Most recently the Mojaloop community, led by Google, has led the development of a centralized PISP API.  We have chosen to the folow the comprehensive UIk Open Banking API standard which is being followed and adopted by a number of countriues through Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. 

Tremendous impact can be had at the Base of the Pyramid by enabling third parties to establish consent with customers authorize transactions to be initiated or information to be accessed from accounts at their financial institution. This  Open Banking API layer would enable any instituion using Mifos or Fineract to provide a UK Open Banking API layer  to third parties and fintechs.  

 The API Gateway to connect to is still being chosen (WS02, Gravitee, etc.)

Description

The APIs that are consumed by the mobile banking applications have been documented in the spreadsheet below. The APIs have also been categorized according to whether they are an existing self-service API or back-office API and if they have an equivalent Open Banking API and if so, a link to the corresponding Open Banking API.

For each API with an equivalent Open Banking API, the interns must: Take rest api, upload swagger definition, do transformation in OpenBanking Adapter, and publish on API gateway.

For back-office and/or self-service APIs with no equivalent Open Banking API, the process is: Take rest api, upload swagger definition, and publish on API gateway.

For example: 

Sample APIs to be Documented

-------------------------------------------

Mifos Mobile API Matrix (completed by Ashwin)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gR84jZzLF-mM0iRw5JyeMAsHMK6RQPK0vyDmNAY9VhE/edit#gid=0

MIfos Mobile API Matrix (completed by Shivangi)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1exTv68v1IW_ygS7mSj0_ySFWGTj06NcxPZeNLjNIy6Y/edit?pli=1#gid=0

Helpful Skills

Android development, SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Spring, OpenJPA, Rest, Kotlin, Gravitee, WSO2

Impact

By providing a standard UK Open Banking API layer we can provide both a secure way for our trusted first party apps to allow customers to autheniticate and access their accounts as well as an API layer for third party fintechs to securely access FIneract and request information or initiate transactions with the consent of customers.

Other Resources

CGAP Research on Open Banking: https://www.cgap.org/research/publication/open-banking-how-design-financial-inclusion

Docs: https://mifos.gitbook.io/docs/wso2-1/setup-openbanking-apis

Self-Service APIs: https://demo.mifos.io/api-docs/apiLive.htm#selfbasicauth

Open Banking Adapter: https://github.com/openMF/openbanking-adapte

    • Transforms Open Banking API to Fineract API

    • Works with both Fineract 1.x and Fineract CN

    • Can connect to different API gateways and can transform against different API standards.

Reference Open Banking Fintech App:

Google Whitepaper on 3PPI: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/nextbillionusers.google/en//tools/3PPI-2021-whitepaper.pdf

UK Open Banking API Standard: https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/

Open Banking Developer Zone: https://openbanking.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DZ/overview

Examples of Open Banking Apps: https://www.ft.com/content/a5f0af78-133e-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e

See https://openmf.github.io/mobileapps.github.io/

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Mentors

Aleksandar Vidakovic

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

UI

Overview & Objectives

TBD

Description

Create a React microfrontend with latest state of the art UI components. Emphasize re-usability and speed. The current standard UI for Fineract is still the Community App which is the only one that covers 100% of the feature set. Unfortunately it’s based on AngularJs which itself is end of life and on occasions standalone libraries like jQuery were used. This makes the project hard to maintain and - apart from the occasional color change - hard to customize let alone integrate in other web applications. Developers should be able to pick any number of standalone components and integrate them in custom UI projects (where Fineract is one among multiple backends). All Fineract UI components should be published to https://www.npmjs.com/ for easy consumption by other developers.

Documentation of the project should follow latest best practices (aka “Storybook”)

Tooling should help with consistency and reduce handwritten code as much as possible. Using Nx (https://nx.dev/ ) is strongly suggested.

Helpful Skills

React, NodeJs, NPM, E2E testing, Cucumber

Impact

Other Resources

  • https://mui.com/

  • https://nx.dev/

OpenG2P  - Digital Identity Proof of Concept with MOSIP

Mentors

Ed Cable Avik Ganguly Paras Dhama

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Platform & Modules - Digital ID, Exploratory, Bleeding Edge

Overview & Objectives

Digital Identity is a pressing topic and for both generations of Fineract (1.x and CN), we'd like to have integration with emerging KYC and digital identity solutions.

KYC (Know your customer) is a fundamental banking concept. It refers to the process of identifying a new customer at the time of account opening, in compliance with law and regulation. The identification requirements may be lower for low value accounts ("Tiered KYC"). The term is also used in connection with regulatory requirements for a provider to understand, on an ongoing basis, who their customer is and how they are using their account. Most of the banks are mandated to perform basic/extensive KYC, before they can serve their customers.

Traditionally KYC is done in a centralised fashion where a central agency has the control over all the data. For example consider each bank like SBI, Deutsche, JP Morgan, etc. when creating a bank account, each of them requires a separate KYC process to be completed and all this data gets stored in their respective databases. Even the systems like Aadhar or social security number, etc. have the data stored in a central manner and maintained by the government. However, in recent times all these centralised identity servers continue to be hacked and the important and private data being stolen regularly.

Omidyar Network along with Gates Foundation have developed the MOSIP project which provides an open source digital ID platform. Integration between Mifos along with Mojaloop can provide an end to end reference architecture for a digital cash transfer system built on open source digital public goods. 

  • Decentralised system means that no one person has control over sensitive data.

  • It enables the re-use of KYC, i.e. each financial institution or in our case each customer using Fineract may not have to perform its own complete KYC, but re-use the KYC already performed by others (those who have the power as issuing authority for any kind of claim).

  • Cryptographic security is the heart of blockchain technologies enhancing privacy.

  • Claim-based system where the end user/customer has the control over his data.

Description

Integration between Mifos/Fineract and digital identity systems and KYC protocols could be deepened. This project would focus on an initial proof of concept integration with MOSIP APIs for digital identity including

  • ID Repository

  • ID authentication

  • Biometric Integration 

  • Registration 

Registering a client with a MOSIP-powered Digital Identity in a Fineract system and verifying that digital identity to perform transactions. 

Helpful Skills

HTML, Spring, Hibernate, REST, Java, AngularJS, Javascript, SQL, 

MOSIP 

Impact

Other Resources

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