Mentors

@Chinmay Kulkarni @Shashank Priyadarshi

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Mobile - Android SDK | Core Development

Overview & Objectives

The goal of this project is to upgrade our Android field officer application to its latest dependencies and to rewrite the application to consume the recently developed Android SDK. The Android client will be the first of the Mifos mobile apps (android-client, mifos-mobile, mobile-wallet) which consume the SDK, reducing repeated code mobile apps, improving developer experience, and making it easier to migrate to newer versions of Apache Fineract 1.x

Description

The student will be working on implementing the following things:

1. Update the Android client to latest dependencies

2. Rewrite Android client to consume SDK instead of native code.

3. Write appropiate unit and integration tests.

4. Update CI/CD to reflect above changes

5. Update corresponding documentation for building the app.

Helpful Skills

Java, Kotlin, Android, Swagger Specification, Open API Specification, Spring (Good to have)

Impact

1. Overall stability by increased testing coverage through a more stable and error-free codebase.

2. Improved developer experience through faster build time.

3. More seamless release management and upstream contribution

4. Reduction of time to upgrade

Other Resources

QA & Testing - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=195730042

Github

https://github.com/apache/fineract

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

https://github.com/openMF/fineract-android-sdk

Mentors

@Aleksandar Vidakovic

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Platform | Core Development | Infrastructure

Overview & Objectives

In 2022 we have made substantial progress in implementing a baseline of behavior-driven tests across the platform using the Cucumber framework. The goal of this project is to expand unit testing coverage across the Fineract platform. Currently most of our automated testing is only through integration tests which take a long time to run and aren’t consistent. Cucumber is being implemented as the unit test framework and this project would focus on converting existing integration tests to unit test and writing new unit tests.

Goals are to increase testing coverage of core modules, reduce run-time at build of completing tests, and implementing some automated reporting to show testing coverage.

Description

The student will be working on implementing the following things:

1. Collaborate with mentor to implement Cucumber framework

2. Collaborate with mentor to implement test containers

3. Refine test data set and scripts

4. Convert high priority integration tests to unit tests

5. Write unit tests for key functional modules

6. Implement reporting to show test coverage.

Helpful Skills

Cucumber, Java, Spring

Impact

1. More frequent & higher quality releases

2. Improved developer experience and ease of submitting pull requests.

Other Resources

Github

https://github.com/apache/fineract

Mentors

@Naman Dwivedi @Devansh Aggarwal @Shivansh Tiwari

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Mobile - Mifos X | Core Development

Overview & Objectives

The major goal of our 2023 development is to refine our current Mobile Wallet to be a strong reference implementation of feature-rich and secure mobile wallet application for fintechs. We provide a reference mobile wallet application for consumers and merchants that has been developed by our Google Summer of Code interns from 2017 to 2021. The mobile wallet provides an extensible mobile wallet framework to support the basic use cases of a mobile wallet as documented in the Level One Project mobile wallet requirements. This extensible framework should support both merchant and client use cases as well as be capable of integrating with a Fineract or Fineract CN back-end.

Over time, we would like Mifos X to be more generically a wallet management system and this reference application is a powerful tool to support that. 

Description

The initial mobile wallet framework along with 2 reference apps, PixieCollect and MifosPay, were developed in 2017. Later we decided to continue with MifosPay application only which as mentioned uses the mobile wallet framework.

In 2019, these functionalities were extended further by Shivansh including improving user experience and redesigning the app, support for Kotlin, integration with two Mojaloop transaction flows via the Paymeht Hub, adding improving Deeplinks, support for standing instructions and more well-rounded support for merchant transactions.

In 2020, Devansh Aggarwal further added complete support for standing instructions, integrated with Fineract CN for core use cases by mapping Fineract back-office APIs to Fineract CN APIs, added multi-theme support, completed integration with Payment Hub EE, added support for Hover, and converted Java code to Kotlin (in progress). For more details refer this

In 2021, Kinar Sharma, worked on developing a new multiplatform mobile wallet application using Kotlin multi-platform. This new application consumes FineractCN APIs and is built upon clean architecture. Kinar completed the data, domain and presentation layer (only for Android) for usecases available in FineractCN.

In 2022, Prashant Singh continued to evolve the app.

In 2023, we are targeting to further develop the mobile wallet framework, fix pending issues and introduce new features. Functional enhancements include:

• Integrate latest version of Payment Hub EE

• Integrate Mifos' notifications framework to provide support for usecases like merchant request to pay.

• Implement Mifos' new design library in MifosPay application

• Update wallet framework to be make use of Mifos' Android SDK

• Migrating Java code to Kotlin

• Improving the security framework to integrate more seamlessly with middlewares, API gateway, and identity management software

• Exploring proof of concept architecture or redesigns to align with movements like the Open Wallet Foundation.
  
  

Helpful Skills

Android development, Java, Kotlin, Rest, SQL, Git

Impact

By providing an extensible mobile wallet framework, allow partners a complete reference stack of back and front-end applications to offer digital financial services to clients.

Other Resources

2020 Mobile Wallet Progress: https://gist.github.com/devansh-299/e2041c07d9ab55a747391951e9090df4

Mobile Wallet Framework: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom

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

Mentors

@Chinmay Kulkarni @Devansh Aggarwal @raul.sibaja

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Mobile - Mifos X | Core Development | Infrastructure

Overview & Objectives

In 2022, Rahul Gill, created and completed the first iteration of our UI library for our mobile apps. Our suite of customer-facing mobile applications include our mobile wallet framework, and mobile banking apps for Fineract 1.x and Fineract CN. These are designed to serve as reference implementations for demonstration purposes but also to act as secure and robust starting dough that can be extended and enhanced and white-labeled.

With the move towards more digital financial services, these reference solutions are ever more important and critical and must appear highly polished, clean, and professional. We are working with a designer to provide a set of clean, consistent and professional UI designs and workflows to implement across our customer-facing apps.

This project would focus on implementing these new designs across the customer-facing apps providing a consistent and familiar look and feel. It will build off of efforts in 2020 and 2021 implementing the UI designs previously proposed during GCI. 

Across all our mobile apps, there are common screens and workflows with a lot of redundant and inconsistent design and development from scratch. The creation of a UI library of common shared components and design standards and guidelines would enable the following:

• Improve developer experience and ease of development

• Consistent look and feel of UIs for all apps

• Defined process for updating apps.

• Develop common UI library to ensure consistency of all apps

• Design guidelines, principles, and standards

• Could potentially be a valuable upstream project in and of itself to create mobile fintech apps

Description

With leadership of our mentors, this project would focus on building on the initial shared components of the UI library based off of the common screens and workflows identified across the various mobile apps. These common flows will be broken down into their-base-level elements and components.
If time permits, these common components could be tested and consumed by building out the UI screens for our reference open banking fintech app using this library.

Design enhancements to customer-facing apps include: 

• Break down common workflows into base-level components

• Refine and update design standards and guidelines

• Create and set up repository to house elements, components, and designs.

• Develop and create base-level elements and components accoring to UI design standards and guidelines

• Implement screens and workflows to test out on reference open banking fintech app

• Documentation to ensure how to use UI library and update mobile app when UI library is updated.

Helpful Skills

Android Development, Kotlin, Java, Jetpack Compose, XML, Git

Impact

A clean and simple UI is key for our low-tech audience and professional and consistent look and feel enhances credibility of our stack. 

Other Resources

Recap on 2022 GSOC Project from Rahul Gill: https://gist.github.com/rahul-gill/6700c366627a2c7007a07b96ff6c0785

Mobile App UI Library

2020 UI Enhancements: https://gist.github.com/ShivangiSingh17/67b6041387c1e281caa7df23347f549e

Mobile Wallet Framework: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom

Mifos Mobile - Android Mobile Banking App: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom

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

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: Standards Home - Open Banking Standards

Open Banking Developer Zone: Developer Zone

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

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

Mentors

 @Jose Hernandez @Aleksandar Vidakovic @Ed Cable

Category

Web - Mifos X Web App/Fineract

Overview & Objectives

Originally this idea was sparked by looking at what Moov has around UI drops - https://moov.io/product/drops/ and https://docs.moov.io/moovjs/drops/ Many different goals, directions, use cases emerge but they would all share in helping make UI more maintainable, more pluggable and having more of a toolkit for builders/developers that would align with Fineract being used for various core banking use cases outside of just financial inclusion as well as the need supporting a variety of fintech use cases with common elementsIn conversation with others, some different directions could emerge:

• @Nayan Ambali and seeing how Finflux has separated out UIs for different personas

• With @Victor Romero  serving the need to help others do custom/specific page view for certain functionality

• Ability to more pluggable components especially for customer-facing operations/use cases

• Have micro-front-ends be brought together to create a monolithic application like the web-app

• @aleksvidakovic suggestion on the real value being in how these components are used in other frameworks/portals and not a full complete application like we currently have.

For this round of GSOC I’d like us to define a project where we could do a micro front-end around a certain domain/functionality and pick a framework/design/architectural approach that we’d follow. (edited) 

Our 2022 intern, Ramveer Singh made substantial progress in completing the development of our new web app such that the Web App is now part of the Mifos X release distribution and we’ve fully deprecated our older Community App. Our Angular 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.

The focus for 2023 will be on continuing to optimize the design of key flows, improving app localization, adding in better context-sensitive help, improving dashboards and visualizations, and refactoring of the web app to consume a type-script client for better maintainability.

Description

Given this project is in it infancy, this would really be a proof of concept design the proper archiecture, learn which use cases are best candidates for pluggable and modular UI components and then choosing a framework in which to deploy multiple micro front-end as a single applicaiton with a unified user experience for end users.

• Propse and design architecture for Micro Front End approach

• Determine best front-end language or javascript framewor to use - leaning towards Angular

• Identify which existing screens or new screens should be implemented as seaprate microservice UIs.

Primary efforts center around:

• Fixing remaining issues

• Redesigning customer and account dashboard pages

• Refactor web app to consume typescript client

• Enhance look and feel of app.

• Implement third party library for proper internationalization.

The remaining issues can be found: https://github.com/openMF/web-app/issues

The progress is being tracked here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JxeJjG1GdZ3BNJi-sScCQLirfevSc8amFr8o3SfUj4U/edit?usp=sharing

Some additional work also includes adding in comprehensive keyboard shortcuts to enable power-users of the app and to ensure that the tabs and arrow keys work appropriately for navigating through the app, localization support, additional dashboards, adding of tooltips, etc. 

Helpful Skills

Javascript, SCSS, HTML5, Angular 9, Angular Material, Flex Layout

Impact

More pluggable, faster to develop, modular UI that better supports variety of use cases of Fineract.

• Reduced dependency on using entire monolithic app.

Other Resources

Usability and Design

Moov UI Drops - https://moov.io/product/drops/ and