Season of Docs - 2022

About Mifos

The best way to understand what we do is to watch a few videos. 

What is Mifos and What Does our Community Do?

How is the Mifos software used? 

2022 Season of Docs Timeline

Please see Google Season of Docs website for the full program timeline. Here are a few key dates and their current status:

2022 Proposal - Update Platform and Collaboration Documentation for Launch of Mifos X 3.0

About the Mifos Initiative

The Mifos Initiative is a global 501(c)3 fintech non-profit  leveraging the cloud, mobile & open source community to democratize financial services worldwide and digitally transform the world’s 3 billion poor and underbanked. We aim to create a world of 3 Billion Maries where everyone has access to the financial resources needed to create a better life for themselves and their family. Our unprecedented approach unites financial institutions, local technology partners, and volunteer developers to collectively advance open source banking infrastructure to sustainably build impactful innovations in digital financial services.

We guide the global Mifos ecosystem of partners and volunteers contributing back to the open source Mifos and Fineract platforms. Mifos donated the codebase to the Apache Software Foundation for what ultimately became the top-level project, Apache Fineract. Both Mifos and Fineract have been nominated and selected by the Digital Public Goods Alliance as foundational digital public goods for the Financial Inclusion Community of Practice. 

More than 20 million clients supported by 400+ fintechs and financial institutions use our open APIs to power their solution across 41+ countries. They are supported by a global community of 100 deployment partners & hundreds of volunteers.

Mifos  is the innovation that powers the innovators by providing a set of open source building blocks that can be composed into financial services of any form. Across the world from grassroots microfinance institutions in rural Africa serving dozens of clients with microloans to government-led banks in Latin America reaching millions to banks in Germany delivering mortgage loans, from digital credit startups reaching hundreds of thousands in West Africa to mobile wallet providers supporting millions in India, to cloud-based core banking systems reaching millions across multiple continents to banking as a service providers enabling neobanks, our open banking stack is transforming the delivery of digital financial service

For the past 15 years, we’ve been at the forefront of transformative technology, building an end to end open source stack for DFS. Our technology stack provides complete banking infrastructure that is cloud-native, mobile-enabled, and scalable to billions that are underbanked. Our stack is a set of Open Source Lego Blocks for DFS including flexible account management (Mifos X) leveraging Open APIs from Apache Fineract and Fineract CN, integrating with digital payment rails like Mojaloop, delivered via web and mobile apps through Open Banking APIs.  

At the heart of our stack is Fineract 1.x, our  composable open source core banking platform that is highly scalable in the cloud and deployable via our reference apps and open APIs.  Coupled with our Mifos web app UI on top of these platforms, We provide a flexible account and wallet management system to enable the delivery of any digital financial service. Next in our stack is our Payment Hub EE which provides a gateway and orchestration engine to connect to real-time payment services and interoperable payment rails like Mojaloop and Mobile Money APIs  Think of Mifos as the DNA of financial services that can be put together into many expressions and Mojaloop as the connective tissue enabling low-cost payments across any system. On top of these open source rails and accounts are reference customer-facing mobile banking and mobile wallet apps which consume our Open Banking APIs and third party PISP APIs. We provide these open source building blocks of financial inclusion, train and certify a network of partners to build solutions with these building blocks, and support and sustain the collaborative infrastructure and ecosystem for these solutions to be scaled and distributed worldwide. 

Documentation audiences across our community include the end users of our software, the staff of financial institutions and fintechs that use Mifos to create customers and their accounts, configure loan and savings products, process transactions and track repayments and deposits, manage their general ledger and generate financial and operational reports. The primary audience of our documentation is our partner community who host, deploy, configure, and support the software for these financial institutions, build new fintech solutions and applications using the APIs, and develop, maintain, and extend the core upstream project which powers their solutions. Joining these partners as part of our developer community are individual volunteers, interns, and corporate strategic partners who collectively guide the development, QA, and release management to ensure timely and high-quality open source releases of our platform.

Our Problem & Need

This project will build off of the 2021 Season of Docs project which consolidated our documentation into one unified portal with separate spaces for developer and user documentation. 

With this solid documentation foundation in place, we now need to update our documentation to reflect the major transformation of our project at both an architectural as well as community infrastructure level. In 2022 we are releasing the most substantial evolution to the platform since its initial launch nearly 10 years ago. This major release will be titled Mifos X 3.0 built on top of Fineract 2.0 

Throughout 2021 and 2022, the community has placed a renewed focus on the Fineract 1.x codebase with major architectural refactorings to enable greater scalability and modularity. In addition we have released a redesigned and modernized version of the reference user interface for staff on Angular, our web app. Lastly our payment orchestration engine, Payment Hub EE has achieved production readiness and is now a more integral component of the end to end stack. . In addition to these enhancements at the platform, UI, and orchestration layer, we have significantly improved deployability through containerization, the contribution process through more automated code checks and analysis as well as the QA process through implementation of the Cucumber test framework. 

This year's project will focus on updating and drafting documentation to reflect this next major evolution in our platform and community infrastructure. 

• The new refactored architecture of the Fineract 1.x platform itself including changes such as improved read/write separation of API calls, migration of database from MySQL to PostgreSQL, migration of ORM from OpenJPA to Eclipselink, introduction of Kafka for reliable event handling framework, transactional idempotency, and integraiton of Spring Batch for improved end of day processing. 

• The updated reference web app user interface with modern components, material design, and skinnability built on top of Angula. 

• The production-ready payment hub EE with additional payment connectors, enhanced operational interface, dashboards and visualizations, and notifications module. 

• Greater deployability through improved containerization, terraform scripts and configurable Helm Charts 

• Streamlined contribution process with more automated code checks

• Improved QA infrastructure through Cucumber Test Framework. 

• Documentation of Mobile UI library and SDK Components (Optional scope) 

The more unified we can make our documentation and show how the various components and solutions all fit together via live APIs and sandbox environments,  the more innovation and upstream contribution we can catalyze. 

Project Scope (35 - 40 man-days) 

The project will consist of refining existing documentation written by developers  and writing new documentation. A small portion of the project will focus on ongoing optimization, organization and consolidation of documentation.  

As part of the development process, our developers include a baseline level of technical and functional documentation. The technical writer chosen, will work alongside existing community volunteers to make the existing documentation more robust and draft new documentation where it doesn’t exist.