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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.

The implementation would probably have 4 parts to it:

a) Code Hooks - Extend functionality of event listeners (what was done for "Guarantor Release for Blocked Funds" for loans) to include key business events like loan creation, loan approval, loan disbursement, savings account creation, savings account activation, savings withdrawal, client creation, client approval, etc. Pre- and Post- events to be enabled for these business events.
b) Enable rules (using Drools) for specific business events (Pre- and Post-)
c) If rule enabled, then evaluate rule. Rule should get the business object and any parent business object as input (Example for a loan disbursement, the loan account and the client details will be automatically supplied as inputs to the rule; For a savings withdrawal; the transaction, savings account and client details will be input to the rule. Evaluate rule and return true or false if the action should continue or not.
d) Implement Client level and account level limits using these rules - this will involve evaluating rules on data that is not directly supplied - For example: customer wants to withdraw 5,000. But has already touched the limit of 10,000 per day. The rule should be capable of evaluating the totals of transactions (i.e. use data not directly supplied to the rule).

To allow field-based staff to manage their daily schedules and to ensure that their supervisors are able to review these tasks and to plan field operations and bring in more efficiency and transparency for field operations. To meet the requirement, Android based app need to be developed to cover these uses cases. And this app will be an extension to MIfos X Android Client built by GSOC intern, Ishan Khanna in 2014.

Field officers typically have a predefined set of tasks to follow, for example: Do survey for a locality, Conduct Group Trainings, Conduct Group Tests, Do Center Meetings and Collections. Each could have a task code to make operations streamlined.

Field officers manage their calendars by selecting an activity and specifying a center, date and time for which this activity is planned. This becomes their planned activity for this slot.

A simple workflow to manage each slot – when field officer starts the activity, status of the slot is changed from “new” to “open” and when the activity is completed, it is set to “closed”. It would be ideal to manage this workflow using a mobile tool – preferably an inbound SMS message. For example: an SMS from the field officer’s phone with the text “OPEN 1430” will change the status to “OPEN” of the field officer’s activity that was planned for 2:30pm.

Field officer may change his plan up to a certain time prior to the start of the activity.

Auditors and branch managers will review the activities and track the field officers’ planning and efficiency.

As financial institutions serving the poor extend to more rural outlying regions and adopt more lightweight branchless and paperless operations, mobile field operation tools are essential. In 2014, GSOC intern Ishan Khanna built out version 1 of our Android-based mobile And this app will be an extension to MIfos X Android Client built by GSOC intern, Ishan Khanna in 2014.

There is a lengthy list of potential Version 2 requirements for the Mifos X Android client including:

• Mifos X Android Client on Google Play
• Mifos X Android Client Source Code on GitHub
• Google Doc Listing Version 2 Requirements

Provide an easy way for reports to "merge-printed" from the Client or account page. Currently, if a user needs to print a specific letter for customer or loan account or savings account - the only way is to develop a report or use stretchy report. This is difficult to use and cannot be invoked from a client or account page.

Easy to print reports like Loan Sanction Letter, Savings Transaction report, Deposit notice etc.

Our AngularJS Community App is the standard application on the Mifos X platform 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 and AngularJS refactoring.

The project will involve the following:

• Performance improvements by introducing on demand loading
• Implement Material Design and Redesign pages and areas of the application needing improvement:
  • Log-in page, chart of accounts, permissions, data tables, collection sheet, etc.
• Upgrade to latest version of http://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap/

Across the globe, thousands of financial cooperatives are bringing financial inclusion to the Base of the Pyramid in the form of SACCOs, credit unions, cooperative societies, etc. One major feature gap that we still don't fully support in Mifos X is proper management of shares and member equity and calculation and posting of dividends. This project would cover that functionality as well as adding loan loss provisioning. Project involves adding two additional batch jobs in Mifos:

a) For Loan Loss Provisioning

b) Dividend calculation and posting for Share accounts

From a business perspective, these add a lot of value in automating some of the key year end computations

Enable two factor authentication for certain types of transactions - for example transfers initiated, need to be confirmed via a One-Time-Password generated by Mifos and sent via SMS to client's mobile number.

Provides more security for clients especially during loan disbursements and savings withdrawals or transfers.

Develop a set of APIs that can be used by a front end application that is meant for Client/Member Self-Service

Allows a member/client in having a self-service channel - i.e. online banking interface through a browser or smartphone app.

This has a dependency on the Self-Service backend API's being available 

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

In most of the cases MFI wants to capture additional data during certain workflows (example: during client closing, wants to conduct exit survey, capture PPI during loan creation) and this requirement can fulfilled by adding option to attach datatable/survey/question group to the pre-defined workflows as certain points (example: during loan creation, during approval time or during disbursement etc).

Enhance data tables to emulate real-life workflows:

• Classification of data tables - as Data capture, UI-read-only, Surveys etc.

• Long internationalized labels for fields

• Sequencing of data tables

• Pre-conditions for a data table - so that the a data can be captured/screen is made visible only if certain conditions are met

• Conditional data tables - For example: some data to be captured for Individual Clients whereas other data to be captured for small businesses

• Data table to be captured along with main entity itself within the same transaction - for example: Address fields for client

• Self-service vs. Staff data tables
  (This list to be reviewed with Markus and Ed to ensure that there is no duplication of effort with other projects like SPM tool)

Helps organization to streamline their data capture process in the MIS and as well as in the field. And this leads toward more measurability of the MFI's impact in the field and more transparency.

Mobile money is rapidly transforming financial inclusion by providing more immediate, impactful, affordable, and secure financial services to the client. Mobile money platforms like M-Pesa offer the client unparalleled value in terms of convenience, security and the possibility of new services and products that are more in line with real-world financial habits.  For financial institutions and their clients to fully scale mobile money and leverage its potential, it needs to be fully integrated with their core-banking system.

Based on the extent of the APIs available through the various mobile money platforms, the level and seamlessness of integration can vary from real-time to end-of-day file-based integration.  This project would work to provide several file, message, and or API-based reference integrations with leading mobile money platforms, including

• M-Pesa
  • File-based integration
• TigoCash
• OrangeMoney
• AirtelMoney

Great efficiency, reduced risk for clients, more impactful and relevant products & services.

•   Research & Data on Various Mobile Money Platforms  - http://goo.gl/XkSbdl

In outbound SMS notification MFI decides when and what information need to be sent to client, but as part of client protection, client has complete rights to request for information about her/his account details(any time any where). Using inbound SMS client can query for her account details such loan amount, status of new loan application, outstanding loan amount.

Transparency and client protection.

See SMS Integration and Outbound SMS

• Hooks
• Showcase of sending event-based SMS

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

2014 GSOC Client Impact Portal Project

• Client Impact Portal User Guide
• GSoC 2014 - Client Impact Portal
• Source Code: https://github.com/openMF/mifosx/pull/1047

Vision for Generic SPM Framework for Mifos X (PPI)

Background on 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)

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).

This will be an optional module inside Mifos X, and this module can be turned on/off based on the institutes requirements. And will be flexible to configure with different CBs (may not be practical to integrate with all CBs).

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.

1. Build a module that extends loan product definition to include specific physical product ordering - e.g. a clean energy loan associated with a specific solar product. Create a daily batch process to send data in JSON or XML to appropriate third party system (e.g. MEC Tracker). Extend this to include "down payments" on the product purchase - i.e. only partially financed.
2. Build a supplier ordering/invoice & financial reconciliation process and transfer funds directly to "Supplier Account" upon fulfillment of order.
3. Create reports on aging of orders, fulfillment timing, and geographic spread.

MFIs become more capable of integrating with third party systems for management of deliveries, after-sales service, and carbon tracking.

This project is a continuation of the initial PayGoSol foundation that was led by 2014 GSOC intern, Antonio Carella.

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.

Work in 2015 will include adding the following features to make it an out-of-the-box solution that any PAYG hardware provider could use:

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

Mifos Android Client on MifosX

• CGAP Research on PAYG Business Models: http://www.cgap.org/publications/access-energy-digital-finance-models-innovation

Data migration can be one of the most challenging and time-consuming phases of an implementation of a core banking system. In 2013, GSOC intern, Avik Ganguly, built our data import tool for generating pre-configured Excel templates to migrate data into Mifos X. In 2014, Diunuge, extended this to other types of information in Mifos X along with integrating it from a stand-alone web app to a core part of the platform. The data import tool is now the foundation for all of our data migration tools.

This project would continue to extend the data import tool to new types of data and APIs that need to be imported, enabling office-level import, and continued integration into the platform. This project will also involve building on top of the data import tool to provide out of the box migrations from other legacy systems such as MicroBanker or Loan Performer.

• Import for other types of data not currently supported
• Populate date using bulk APIs
• Enable office-level imports for larger organizations who find it too cumbersome to migrate an entire organizations worth of data at once
• Build out scripts on top of the data import tool to get data and transform it out of legacy systems like MicroBanker or Loan Performer.

It has many impacts

1. This drastically reduces the time to set up of initial configuration/data of Mifos X for organization adopting this system as MIS.
2. For data entry operator, this feature can be used as bulk creation option (such as import bulk loans, import clients)
3. These templates can be used as offline store. And once user has internet connectivity can upload these templates with captured data.

GSOC 2013 - Data Import Tool

GSoC 2014 - Data Import/Export feature

For better usability system needs to have notifications to the logged in user about actions he/she needs to perform in the application.

Build real time notification system in application to notify to users about pending/new actions she/he needs to take. Example if branch manager login to the application and 3 new loans are created and pending for approval then system should notify him/her about the pending actions.

This involves both invoking and triggering these notifications based on these actions or activities as well as the extension of the user interface to support the display of the notifications as well as the ability of the user to take action upon the notifications.

Right now Mifos X contains core client management functionalities including tracking basic demographic information, know your customer information, document management, and survey collection through data tables. As financial institutions serving the poor begin to offer a more in-depth and diverse range of financial inclusion products, the need for more robust client management and in-depth client understanding has grows. Their core system needs to provide more and more CRM-type functionality that complement the portfolio management and financial/social reporting the Mifos X provides.

This project will work to deliver the initial set of customer relationship management functionalities including a module for tracking inquiries, complaints

This module will have a request management functionality. A request can be of 2 types: Complaints and Service Requests. Each request must be against a customer and optionally against an account of the customer. Each request will go through a simple workflow.

Actions that can be performed on a request:

Assign -> will change status to "assigned"

Start Work --> will change status to "in progress"

Close --> will change status to "closed" (with a sub-reason code)

At each step user can enter comments.

The customer summary screen will have a link to view the requests of the customer - along with a summary and current status - with option to click-through to get the complete history of each request.

Deepening the client relationship and ensuring fair, responsible, and transparent financial services to the poor is a core piece of the industry's roadmap for financial inclusion. Providing customers the ability to voice their concerns and feedback about the services they're receiving provides a simple yet powerful tool to protect the client. Empowering the financial institution with the ability to track these inquiries and overall maintain a more holistic relationship tracking entire lifecycle of their clients gives them a much better ability to understand their clients and respond to their needs with appropriately designed services and products.

We believe the Mifos X platform is super secure and impenetrable. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prove us wrong, and help close gaps you may find.

Beyond a one time exercise, you should integrate (some of) the tools you've used into our build chain so that, even after you've gone, tools flag up future newly introduced potential vulnerabilities.

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page

https://code.google.com/p/zaproxy/

http://wapiti.sourceforge.net

Run FindBugs & related tools for some serious static code analysis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_test

This project's goal is to create an Amazon Cloud formation template for Mifos deployments at large Organisations. We would measure how we scale, with concrete scenarios and hard numbers, and produce documentation about this helping organization who are evaluating Mifos.

We would also try to identify and fix performance bottlenecks in the MifosX and the community app codebase

You would be creating a Cloud formation template on AWS for a sample high performance Mifos setup. The setup would include

• Approximately 5 web servers (Apache) on medium EC2 instances fronted with a load balancer
• Approximately 5 Tomcats servers on large EC2 instances fronted with a load balancer
• Multi Az extra Large RDS
• Distributed in memory cache environment

You would then use Jmeter (or a tool of your choice) to create realistic data and run and benchmark performance on this setup. Based on the figures, we would make fixes to either to the MifosX / Community app codebases to fix any identified performance bottlenecks and then carry out multiple iterations of tweaking the Cloud formation template to achieve best performance.

http://twitter.github.io/iago/

http://www.loadui.org (by the good people behind SOAPui)

Selenium WebDriver

https://jmeter.apache.org/

http://grinder.sourceforge.net/

http://opensta.org/

This project would seek to create one unified ID/login and profile for community members similar to the OpenMRS ID. It would achieve the following two primary objectives:

1. One unified profile and identity for community members in which they can share with the community who they are and also build reputation and recognition. This ability to discover and self-identify with other community members is difficult when we have so many different tools and profiles to maintain.
2. Single Sign On for our various collaboration and community infrastructure tools listed below.

1. Identifying a single sign-on authentication protocol that ties together authentication of our various community collaboration tools: 1) Atlassian Studio - JIRA, Confluence, JIRA Agile, 2) Social Q&A - AnswerHub 3) Mailing Lists - Mailman (administered through SourceForge 4) Source Code Version Control - GitHub 5) Continuous Integration - Jenkins 6) General Community Website (mifos.org) - Wordpress 7) Partner Directory
   1. This could be built out independently, tie into some OpenID protocol, or leverage one of our existing tools for this authentication - Atlassian Studio/Crowd or AnswerHub or another common OpenID protocol. 
2. Design and implement a dashboard to handle the creation of this unified ID
3. Design and create a common profile tied to this ID with basic information and photos that is searchable by the community.

Design a profile

Extra Credit:

• Gamification/Reputation Building - Tie into Open Badge system like Mozilla Open Badges http://openbadges.org/ or Ushahidi Badges: http://ushahidi.github.io/Badges/

Impact is two-fold:

• Common unified profile and identity can help to grow collaboration and participation in the community. By being able to simply share who you are or discover who's in your community, we can deepen the bonds of community which motivates each member to participate more often and invest personally in the health of the community. Building reputation and recognizing efforts of each type of community member (users, partners, volunteers, etc) in a tangible way also helps to increase participation.
• Single sign-on will it make much easier for community members to collaborate and communicate. Right now there is often a high barrier to signing up for the various tools - SSO will make that process easier but also encourage others to more regularly be involved.

 Create a POC of a scalable MifosX implementation (with load balanced tomcats and percona servers) on an openstack setup on a public cloud. Also publish a whitepaper with details of Openstack setup

 Mifosx 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 (includes load balanced tomcats, percona mysql server etc ) on OpenStack. The POC would be on a public cloud provider (Rackspace?)
• Publish a whitepaper of the same, which can be used as a reference for local implementors (who would additionally take care of provisioning their own hardware)

Mifos X today is typically used on Tomcat (with Jetty known to work). For a certain class of users, testing it on "Enterprise Stack" application servers (meaning IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic) is desirable - this project would properly test Mifos X on these configurations, make any adaptations to the code which may be required, and produce easy to follow documentation or even small tools helping future users how to go about this.

This project could be combined with and taken up by the same candidate as the Enterprise database project.

Java, Application Server configuration, WAS classloading crap tricks, documentation writing.

Use Cargo, Arquillian etc. for automated testing against WAS & WLS containers?

Vendor pages

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.

The AngularJS-based Mifos X UI, like most of today's AngularJS-based or really most web apps, is "coded out" with JavaScript & HTML partial views. This project aims to explore and deliver at least partially working solution, based on and applied to Mifos X UI as a "case study", how web UI of modern SPA web applications can be "modeled" (described), and "generated" (at build, or better, runtime right within the browser). Advantages of such a model driven (MDA / MDD) approach incl. that less technical users can change screen definitions themselves, and that changes to the underlying technical architecture (e.g. AngularJS version and other JS frameworks used) ideally only affect the generators, not the functional screen models.

You could base this on ongoing explorations in https://github.com/vorburger/MUI.js, and using EFactory / ESON as model syntax (see https://github.com/vorburger/efactory; ESON a JSON-like EMF Xtext technology which is currently being incubated as a formal eclipse.org project). The goal and expected outcome of this project isn't some write up, but actually running code.

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

Develop ETL scripts to create OLAP cubes (fact and dimension tables in MySQL). This will allow managers to perform ad hoc slicing and dicing of their data 
to answer important questions about their operations.

• Create ETL scripts and tests
• Create a Mondrian schema to work with Saiku Analytics

While the Mifos X Community App front-end UI based on AngularJS-based currently does already have some JS unit tests, we lack a full UI level web tests which continually non-regression test common scenarios. We believe having this could add value in terms of quality, including ensuring automated cross browser testing.

Possibly building upon a extremely limited small scale existing POC (if you find it to be a useful starting point), your mission, should you chose to accept it, would be to build out comprehensive UI walk through scenario test coverage for the Mifos X UI. If you can build more such tests faster and more maintainable (= less code) by using any of the existing frameworks listed below or others you know of / will find, or build useful such infrastructure yourself as part of this code, we're eager to hear from you! Keep in mind that the main deliverable of this project is not (only) a foundation framework, but must actually include an extensive suite of running tests integrated into the Mifos build.

http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/

https://github.com/vorburger/mifosx-ui-selenium-webdriver-tests

https://github.com/vorburger/webdriver-runner

https://saucelabs.com or https://browserling.com

https://github.com/FluentLenium/FluentLenium

http://www.gebish.org

http://www.thucydides.info

Integrate MifosX with an opensource Point of Sale (POS) called JPOS.

Use case would be to get a debit transaction (cash withdraw from checking account) thru the POS device /local runtime with 2FA.  In India, the ability to get cash out through a point of sale network is provided for under RBI regulations. In production there will likely need to be an intermediate "Merchant Acquisition" or "Payment Processor" in between a single POS and MifosX Instance, but this could be abstracted out as a payment gateway only (primarily data mapping). The implementation target is the ability to do a 2 factor authentication on a POS device running JPOS (emulator ok), input account number (via some simple method), then be able to do a (cash-out) account withdrawal in real time to the MifosX account. Additional use cases would be to implement a transaction for payment for goods. i.e. enter specific goods, then do payment from MifosX account to Merchant Account (probably also in Mifos).

Familiarity with API work. Understanding of transactional flows.

Java.

Two-factor authentication - see other project idea .

https://github.com/jpos/jPOS/