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

https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/spaces/MIFOSX/pages/3013476363

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: 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/

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 https://docs.moov.io/moovjs/drops/

Article on Angular & Micro Front-ends using Module Federation - https://auth0.com/blog/micro-frontends-with-angular-module-federation-and-auth0/

Mentors

 @Karan Takalkar @Bharath Gowda @Mohit Bajoria

Category

Web - Mifos X Web App

Overview & Objectives

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

In 2018, we made the decision to re-write the entire Mifos X web app from Angular 1.75 to Angular 6 providing cleaner Material design, access to brand new libraries, better theming/skinnability, and a more stable and modern codebase. In 2019 we continued the re-write and upgraded to Angular 7.  In 2020 we upgraded to Angular 9 and continued the rewrite. The re-write is nearly complete and now just needs to focus on a few minor  remaining enhancements and optimizations. You can see the in-progress new UI at https://demo.mifos.community  (mifos/password)

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

Enhanced User Experience, Intuitive application design

2022 Progress: https://gist.github.com/ramvr1256/11c197b038250e7394462e8687ef15f8

2020 Progress: https://gist.github.com/karantakalkar/7a4acb83f31ebfe4f3b827c86c67eec0

https://gist.github.com/muskankhedia/b0929cbf2ae6236bfe07964a140da179

Other Resources

Usability and Design

Mentors

@Courage Angeh, @Victor RomeroTom Daly @Ed Cable

Length

Large

Category

Platform - DevOps | Infrastructure

Overview & Objectives

Mifos & Fineract integrated with Mojaloop via Payment Hub EE provides a end to end open source architecture for a building a complete digital financial services solution including managing wallets and stores of value In Mifos and Fineract to orchestrating and initiating real-time payments via the Mojaloop APIs throught Payment Hub EE orchestration engine. However, it takes significant time and effort to deploy and install each of these individual components which are comprised various microservices and libraries and dependencies. This presents a steep barrier for fintechs and financial institutions to evaluate and discover the potential of this powerful stack. This project aims to create a deployable package along with storyboards to help an individual developer rapidly deploy this end to end environment. Each of the various individual solutions/projects have a number of different options available to ease deployment into the cloud including infrastructure as code, docker images, helm charts, terraform scripts, etc.

Description

Create a deployable package that incorporates the various components of the end to end stack - Mifos/Fineract, Mojaloop, Payment Hub EE, Mifos Channel App (mobile wallet/mobile banking) Initial deployment would target Azure but a bonus goal would be to make it cloud-agnostic. Form of cloud deployment to be decided with mentor but would utilize existing resources like helm charts, terraform scripts, docker compose containers and pages, kubernetes enviroments, etc.. Deployable package would include:

• Latest stable release of Fineract core banking system (1.8.4 or 1.9)

• Latest stable version of Mojaloop or Miniloop (1.5)

• Latst stable releaseof Mifos X Web App

• Latest upstream version of Payment Hub EE

• Storyboard/Cookbooks for standard use cases in the form of BPMN diagrams.

• N.B: 

• I would like to hear the applicants own ideas.

• The task for the completion of this project may change depending on input from the community, the mentors and the applicant.

Helpful Skills

Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Bash, Java - Spring, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Cassandra, TDD With JUnit 4, Gradle

Impact

Provide an easy to deploy package to help fintechs evaluate Mifos/Fineract, Mojaloop, and Payment Hub EE

Other Resources

Helm Chart for Fineract deployment - https://github.com/fynarfin/fineract-env/tree/master/helm/fineract

Helm Charts for Payment Hub EE deployment  - https://github.com/openMF/ph-ee-env-labs/tree/master/helm

Docker Compose for Mifos - (Fineract Back-End + Web App) - https://github.com/openMF/mifos-x-containers

Docker Hub Image of Fineract - https://hub.docker.com/u/openmf

https://hub.docker.com/r/apache/fineract

Fineract Technical Documentation - https://fineract.apache.org/docs/current/

Miniloop -  https://github.com/tdaly61/mini-loop.git

Payment Hub EE - https://payments.mifos.org

Lab Environment Overview - https://mifos.gitbook.io/docs/payment-hub-ee/overview/lab-environment

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: 

• Submit Loan Application (Self-ServiceAPIwith EquivalentOpenBankingAPI)

•  

  • https://demo.mifos.io/api-docs/apiLive.htm#loans_create

  • Used by Mifos Mobile

• ImagesAPI(Back-OfficeAPIwith No EquivalentOpenBankingAPI)

•  

  • https://demo.mifos.io/api-docs/apiLive.htm#client_images

  • Used by Mifos Mobile and Mobile Wallet 

• Fetch Identification CardAPI(Fineract CNAPIwith no equivalentOpenBankingAPI)

•  

  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/15LbxVoQQRoa4uU7QiV7FpJFVjkyyNb9_HJwFvS47O4I/edit?pli=1#heading=h.xfl6jxdpcpy1

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

• https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Customer+Self-Service+Phase+2

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:

• Backend: https://github.com/openMF/openbanking-tpp-server

• GUI: https://github.com/openMF/openbanking-tpp-client

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/

Mentors

@Rahul Goel @Manthan Surkar @Aleksandar Vidakovic

Category

Platform, Core Development

Overview & Objectives

Mifos X and Apache Fineract is widely used by financial institutions of all different sizes and methodologies around the world. With that widespread user base there is a vast array of different processes and procedures that would like to be supported as slight modifications over the common functionality provided. Over the past several years, we have captured these minor enhancements in our issue tracker as feature requests. Also included in this backlog or additional minor and less critical bugs that have been reported but have not been fixed yet.  This backlog has grown and it would be a very impactful project for an intern to work on completing as many of these bug fixes and minor enhancement as possible.

The difficult level of these issues ranges from low to higher and touch all componets of the platform - most don't require too much domain knowledge but some will. 

There are ~600 open issues for Apache Fineract; our JIRA Dashboard is a nice way to get an overview.

Your mission for this project, should you choose to accept it, is to reduce the number of open issues. The work required to do so will range from trivial old issues that are stale which you can close after doing some initial triage, to fascinating work required on both the functional as well as the technical side of our community to drive down the count of our open bugs.

This project is ideal to share among several GSOC participants, possibly in combination with other projects listed below.

Description

We have groomed the backlog and tagged issues and feature requests that are relevant for this project with the labels gsoc and/or Volunteer.  Priority level of tasks is measured by p1 being the highest priority. Tasks with an assigned fix version of 1.7.0 have a higher priority. 

There are more than 120 tickets in the saved filter. You are not expected to complete all of the tasks in the backlog but throughout the internship you should fix as many issues/feature requests as possible. You will work with your mentor to deliver a plan for each sprint and adjust velocity as you get scaled up.

Issues to be worked on can be found at https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12345785 - the saved filter is named 2023 Intern Project. 

Helpful Skills

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

Impact

Better internal control and financial transparency

Other Resources

Getting Started with Apache Fineract: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Getting+Started+Docs

Mentors

@Aleksandar Vidakovic

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Platform, Core Development

Overview & Objectives

TBD

Description

Lombok could help us to not only reduce a large amount of code, but also to fix a couple of inconsistencies in the code base:

• getters/setters with non-standard characters (e. g. underscores)

• getters/setters with typos

The layered architecture of Fineract requires mapping between REST DTO classes and internal entity classes. The current code base contains various strategies to achieve this:

• private functions

• static functions

• mapping classes

All of these approaches are very manual (and error prone) and difficult to maintain. Mapstruct can help here:

• throw errors at compile time (missing new attributes, type changes etc.)

• one common concept (easier to understand)

• reduce manually maintained code and replace mostly generated code

Challenges:

• maintain immutability (especially in DTO classes)

• should we fluent builder pattern?

• backwards compatibility

• these improvements cannot be introduced as one pull request, but have to be split up at least at the “module” level (clients, loans, accounts etc.). This would result in approximately 30 pull requests; if we split up Lombok and Mapstruct then it would be 30 PRs each (=60); we would need this fine grained approach to make a transition as painless as possible

• some classes are maybe beyond repair (e. g. Loan.java with 6000 lines of code, the smaller part getters/setters and a long list of utility/business logic functions)

Helpful Skills

Java, Spring, Gradle, refactoring large code bases, testing

Impact

Better code navigation for new and existing developers, increase focus on business logic, reduce code maintenance. Note: this change is potentially very disruptive, but would reduce the existing code base by 20% (a guess, but I’m confident that this number is more or less true); less code, less bugs, better readability, more focus on features, faster turn around (a lot of time is lost maintaining boilerplate code).

Other Resources

• https://mapstruct.org/

• https://projectlombok.org/features/all

• https://www.baeldung.com/intro-to-project-lombok

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/

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

• MOSIP https://www.mosip.io/

• MOSIP Docs: https://docs.mosip.io/platform/

Mentors

@Lalit Mohan S @Abhijit Ramesh @Nasser Kaze

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Platform - Modules, AI, Bleeding Edge

Overview & Objectives

Financial Organizations using Mifos/Fineract are depending on external agencies or their past experiences for evaluating credit scoring and identification of potential NPAs. Though information from external agencies is required, financial organizations can have an internal scorecard for evaluating loans so that preventive/proactive actions can be done along with external agencies reports. In industry, organizations are using rule based, Statistical and Machine learning methods for credit scoring, predicting potential NPAs, fraud detection and other activities. This project aims to implement a scorecard based on statistical and ML methods for credit scoring and identification of potential NPAs.

Description

The approach should improve last year's GSOC work on Features/Characteristics, Criteria and evaluation. The design and implementation of the screens should follow Mifos Application standards. Should implement statistical and ML methods with explainability on decision making. Should also be extensible for adding other functionalities such as fraud detection, cross-sell and up-sell, etc.

The system should be able to connect to external sources/providers(e.g. Credit Bureaus) to obtain a credit history that should weigh for the credit worthiness. The scorecard should be able to self update with increase and changes in data. This requires an ML pipeline to continually improve the scorecard models.

Priorities:

• Further optimize the ML and statistical models.

• Improve the Rule Based scoring system by fine-tuning the features.

• Setup ML pipeline to refresh dataset and models using Federated Learning techniques

• Implement Synthetic Data using SDV or any other open source synthetic data

• Extend the approach beyond Credit Scoring such as Fraud detection

Helpful Skills

JAVA, Integrating Backend Service, MIFOS X, Apache Fineract, AngularJS, ORM, ML, Statistical Methods, Django

Impact

Streamlined Operations, Better RISK Management, Automated Response Mechanism

Other Resources

Source Code: https://github.com/apache/fineract-credit-scorecard

Previous GSOC Progress

• 2022: https://github.com/Zavier-opt/fineract-federatedLearning-research/blob/main/READEME.md Suchit’s Final Report - https://gist.github.com/sksDonni/53887ee6744330c4c8fbc1e18367331c

• 2021: https://gist.github.com/xurror/bba79ecbf063dd8eae8ee9c24732701e

• 2020: https://gist.github.com/humbletechy/43e7322913af561fdd7db5d4962d59a7

• 2019: https://gist.github.com/SupreethSudhakaranMenon/a20251271adb341f949dbfeb035191f7

Documentation

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Fineract+Credit+Scorecard

https://gist.github.com/lalitsanagavarapu

Mentors

@Gaurav Saini, @Pranjal Goswami, @Maulik Soneji, @Giorgio Zoppi 

Category

Web - Fineract CN Web App

Overview & Objectives

A new reference user interface on Fineract CN for staff of financial institutions such as digital, challenger, and neo-banks that focused on individual accounts is needed for multiple reasons:

1. The current fims-web-app reference UI on top of Fineract CN is incomplete, unpolished and doesn't serve as a good representation of capabilities of Fineract CN.

2. As more financial inclusion providers focus on individual lending and savings products and more digital banks/neo-banks and fintechs that don't have group or center-based operations explore Mifos and Fineract CN, we'd need to have a reference UI that is more in line with those requirements. We don't want prospective users to come and see the microfinance-centric UI and immediately think that the platform might not be useful for them.

The focus of this project for 2023 would be around the savings/current/transactional accounts and ledger/accounting modules. Given the maturity of the loan management capabilities in Fineract 1.x, a number of implementers are exploring Fineract CN for managing deposit accounts yet it is challenging to understand the value of this module without a UI in place. Hence the focus of this project would be on the UI for these components.

Description

Intern will implement the front-end UI screens for the Fineract CN web UI for the following functionalities and use cases. Some of these have only been implemented with mock data at the moment so the app needs to be updated to actually consume the API endpoints for

• Customers

  • Create New Customers

• Current/Savings/Deposits/Transaction Accounts

  • Create and Edit Products

  • Create and Activate New Accounts

  • View Account Detail

  • Initiate deposits and withdrawals

  • Initiate transfers between own savings accounts

  • Initiate transfers with other member savings accounts

  • View and search transaction history

• Accounting

  • Create Chart of Accounts

  • Create Journal Entries

  • Map Financial Transactions to General Ledger Accounts

  • View and Search Journal Entries

• Update app to latest stable version of Angular.

Helpful Skills

Javascript, CSS, HTML5. Angular and Bootstrap (CSS framework) is plus

Impact

Reference UI for neobanks/fintechs/wallet providers and financial institutions looking to managge deposit accounts on Apache Fineract CN

Other Resources

Usability and Design

Use Cases - https://github.com/openMF/digital-bank-ui/wiki/Use-Cases-&-Requirements

2020 Progress: https://gist.github.com/abhi40308/21cf6f1ac78efe309faaf6a0d6d971e4 and view a showcase of the UI at https://youtu.be/WFxcdD38CfE?t=926 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFxcdD38CfE

Github

https://github.com/openMF/digital-bank-ui

https://github.com/openMF/digital-bank-ui/issues

Mentors

@Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi @Garvit Agarwal @Saksham Handu @Paras Dhama

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Mobile - Mifos X | Core Development

Overview & Objectives

Mifos Mobile is a reference mobile banking app which enables clients to authenticate themselves, view and edit their account details. and make repayments or transactions between their own accounts. It is now possible for any It is now possible for any financial institution using Mifos to provide an omni-channel banking experience including  including smartphone-based mobile banking, USSD-based mobile banking, and online banking via a web app.

In 2019, our Google Summer of Code intern, Prashant, extended our mobile banking app, completing a mix of functional, architectural, and design improvements including improving the outbound notification system by migrating from GCM to FCM, initial integration with RocketChat for direct customer support between staff and clients, a dark theme and better support for skinning, and phase 1 of integration with Mojaloop via the payment hub. In 2020 Shivangi revamped the UI and Ashwin began the migration to Kotline for mutli-platform development.

With the payment hub and API Gateway now in place, next we look to add additional mobile money and payment system integrations into the app as well as having the app connect via the Open Banking API rather than the self-service APIs. This exercise of mapping the Fineract self-service APIs to the Open Banking APIs will be the major focus of this project. 

It was built on top of the Apache Fineract 1.x client-facing APIs to enable self-service channels for clients to interact with their own data and transact in a self-service manner.

Description

Work will involve both development of the Android application as well as work on the back-end to map the Fineract APIs to Open Banking APIs. New features to be added for 2023: 

• Replace API layer from self-service Fineract APIs to Open Banking APIs

• Complete Support for customer support/chat via RocketChat

• Integration with an external payment system (Mojaloop, mPesa) via our payment hub. 

• Migrate Dagger to Hilt

• Migrate from MVP to MVVM-Clean architecture (Not the whole project, maybe 20-30%)

• The basic integration of the Navigation Graph in the project

• The basic integration of Coroutines

• Continue adding unit tests for Data Layer and UI Layer

• Cover all the screens with UI tests

• Improve Githhub workflows and add jobs to run Unit and UI tests

• Basic integration of Jetpack Compose

Helpful Skills

Android Development, Kotlin, Coroutines, Hilt, MVVM, SQL, Git, OpenJPA, Rest, WS02 API Gateway

Impact

By providing an extensible mobile banking app, allow a member/client in having a self-service channel allowing them more direct control and visibility into their financial livelihood.

Other Resources

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

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

Source Code: https://github.com/openMF/mifos-mobile

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

Mifos Webinar on Open Banking API: 

Mifos Open Banking API Documentation: https://app.gitbook.com/@mifos/s/docs/

GsoC 2020 work progress final report: https://gist.github.com/ShivangiSingh17/67b6041387c1e281caa7df23347f549e

Mentors

@Avik Ganguly @Subham Pramanik @Paras Dhama

Category

Platform - Payments Integrations

Overview & Objectives

Mobile money is rapidly transforming financial inclusion by providing more immediate, impactful, affordable, and secure financial services to the client. Providers like MFS Africa and Beyonic provide a set of cross-border payment rails to enable remittances across Africa terminating in mobile money wallets. 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.

Description

The Payment Hub EE has been built out as an integration layer between Fineract and real-time payment systems like Mojaloop. Built around the Zeebe as an orchestration engine, it's built with an extensible architecture with a set of connectors for additional core banking systems, channels, and payment systems. We have a connector built for Mojaloop and the GSMA mobile money API and would like to build additional ones for the most widely used payment rails across our community. As part of our DIAL-funded project to integrate Mifos with the open source Mojaloop payments platform the team from DPC consulting built out a middleware component called the payment hub to enable the integration with the Mojaloop APIs. This middleware will also serve as the point of integration for all other external payment systems - the payment hub is extendable by additional payment connectors. This project would focus on adding the connector for the Beyonic APIs. Beyonic is a global mobile money aggregator which provides a common set of payment and collection APIs to seamlessly integrate with the leading mobile money platforms in East and West Africa. 

Our 2020 project provided a connector for GSMA mobile money API which can be followed as a blueprint for other connectors. 

This project will involve building the Beyonic connector and integrating with the specific Beyonic APIs for the mobile money use cases to be supported.

Helpful Skills

Web Services, Java, SQL , JavaScript , Git, Sprint

Impact

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

Other Resources

• 2020 Progress: https://gist.github.com/SubhamPramanik/905ea87b83dd0b6af62af18ca0c0c1ea

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

• Payment Hub EE Docs: https://mifos.gitbook.io/docs/payment-hub-ee/overview/payment-hub-apis 

• Overview of Payment Hub and How to Configure (See Section 5.6.3): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XnAuWxmX-Fof7-o69IyU9ilwcmigqQ6dNHc9uNRx1r4/edit?usp=sharing

• Functional and Technical Specification on the Payment Hub: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iVTgqljj5jW1eczpUcN_qykvWGh9bPKalxDayW8ZGcU/edit?usp=sharing

• Beyonic APIs: https://apidocs.beyonic.com/

Mentors

@Subham Pramanik

Category

Platform - Payments Integrations

Overview & Objectives

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.

Description

As part of our DIAL-funded project to integrate Mifos with the open source Mojaloop payments platform the team from DPC consulting built out a middleware component called the payment hub to enable the integration with the Mojaloop APIs. This middleware will also serve as the point of integration for all other external payment systems - the payment hub is extendable by additional payment connectors. This project would focus on adding the connector for the GSMA Mobile Money API. In 2016 GSMA published a first set of harmonized mobile money APIs to "ensure best practice in API design, security design, and more and to "address the complexity and fragmentation that is apparent in the fast-growing industry. 

The GSMA Mobile Money APIs are OTT (Over the Top) APIs that have been designed to cater for a core set of mobile money use cases:

• Interoperability between mobile money and banks, or among mobile money providers

• Merchant payments, online and offline, including delegated authentication of transactions

• Bill payments and instant notification of payment

• Basic account management

• International transfers, including request for quotation

• Bulk transactions

• Cash in / Cash out

This project will extend the work started by Sidhant Gupta under the mentorship of Avik Ganguly in 2019. 

This project will involve building the GSMA Mobile Money API connector and integrating with the specific APIs for the mobile money use cases to be supported.

Helpful Skills

Web Services, Java, SQL , JavaScript , Git, Spring

Impact

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

Other Resources

• 2020 Progress: https://gist.github.com/SubhamPramanik/905ea87b83dd0b6af62af18ca0c0c1ea

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

• Payment Hub Repository: https://github.com/openMF/payment-hub

• Overview of Payment Hub and How to Configure (See Section 5.6.3): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XnAuWxmX-Fof7-o69IyU9ilwcmigqQ6dNHc9uNRx1r4/edit?usp=sharing

• Functional and Technical Specification on the Payment Hub: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iVTgqljj5jW1eczpUcN_qykvWGh9bPKalxDayW8ZGcU/edit?usp=sharing

• GSMA Mobile Money API Developer Portal: https://developer.mobilemoneyapi.io/

• GSMA Mobile Money Design Principles: https://mmapi.gsma.com/

Mentors

@Manoj VM@Subham Pramanik

Category

Platform - Payments Integrations

Overview & Objectives

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.

Description

As part of the GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab, they are building an Interoperability Test Platform to test how service providers can connect to a mobile money system via the GSMA Mobile Money API and how MNOs and DFSPs can connect to a central switch/hub via the Mojaloop API. The Mifos Initiative has also built and configured a lab environment that provides an immersive user experience complete with rich user interfaces to test out various scenarios and transaction flows originated across Mojaloop and via GSMA mobile money APIs from the perspective of various DFSPs including MFIs, wallet providers, merchants, etc. GSMA has built a transformation layer on PHP to map the GSMA Mobile Money API to the Mojaloop Open API. We would like to incorporate this transformation layer into our lab environment and to do so must write the transformation layer in a more production-ready language like Java. This project would focus on writing that Java transformation layer and ensuring the GSMA Mobile Money API connector is in place for the payment hub and API gateway. 

In 2016 GSMA published a first set of harmonized mobile money APIs to "ensure best practice in API design, security design, and more and to "address the complexity and fragmentation that is apparent in the fast-growing industry. 

The GSMA Mobile Money APIs are OTT (Over the Top) APIs that have been designed to cater for a core set of mobile money use cases:

• Interoperability between mobile money and banks, or among mobile money providers

• Merchant payments, online and offline, including delegated authentication of transactions

• Bill payments and instant notification of payment

• Basic account management

• International transfers, including request for quotation

• Bulk transactions

• Cash in / Cash out

This project will extend the work started by Sidhant Gupta under the mentorship of Avik Ganguly in 2019. 

This project will involve building the GSMA Mobile Money API connector and integrating with the specific APIs for the mobile money use cases to be supported.

Helpful Skills

Web Services, Java, SQL , JavaScript , Git, Spring, Rest, Spring

Impact

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

Other Resources

• 2019 Progress: https://gist.github.com/sidhant-gupta-004/090a9e95b3066e5dd0f8f6005ea60d04

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

• GSMA Presentation from January 2020 Mojaloop Convening: bit.ly/2ujY26I

• GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab: https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/mobile-money/gsma-inclusive-tech-lab/

• Payment Hub Repository: https://github.com/openMF/payment-hub

• Overview of Payment Hub and How to Configure (See Section 5.6.3): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XnAuWxmX-Fof7-o69IyU9ilwcmigqQ6dNHc9uNRx1r4/edit?usp=sharing

• Functional and Technical Specification on the Payment Hub: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iVTgqljj5jW1eczpUcN_qykvWGh9bPKalxDayW8ZGcU/edit?usp=sharing

• GSMA Mobile Money API Developer Portal: https://developer.mobilemoneyapi.io/

• GSMA Mobile Money Design Principles: https://mmapi.gsma.com/

Mentors

@Nikhil Pawar, @Manthan Surkar @Victor Romero

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Platform - Fineract | Core Development | Infrastructure

Overview & Objectives

As our product is core banking platform and our clients are financial institutions, we strive hard to make our code base as secure as possible. However, due to ever increasing security threats and vulnerabilities, it is the need of hour that we analyze our code base in depth for security vulnerabilities. During pull request merge process, we have a process in place wherein we do peer code review,QA and integration tests. This practice has been very effective and our community is already reaping the benefits of such a strong code review process. However, we should test our code against the standard vulnerabilities which have been identified by reputed organisations like Mitre to gain more confidence. It has become a critical part of independent and partner-led deployments

Description

We can make use of opensource tools like Jlint, Findbugs , SonarQube or frameworks like  Total output Integration Framework (TOIF) - used by companies dedicated to produce military grade secure systems. As our environments become more containerized we can also utilize tools like: Anchore, Snyk.io, and Docker Bench for Security

It would be worthwhile, if we can dedicate one GSOC project for this analysis and fixing of critical vulnerabilities and actual bugs. The student would be responsible to analyse the findings, generate reports, identify if it is really a bug and then submit a fix after consultation from the community. Of course, the student needs to demonstrate some basic understanding of security vulnerabilities( like buffer overflow etc) and should have some academic level of experience working with static analysis tools.

Prioritization of Focus would be on:

• Vulnerabilities, Hotspots, Bugs, and Code Smells in that order.
  
  

Helpful Skills

Java (Spring/JPA/Jersey), SQL , JavaScript , Git, Apache POI

Impact

Improved security keeping the integrity and privacy of the underbank's financial data intact.

Other Resources

Current SonarCloud Results:

https://sonarcloud.io/dashboard?id=apache_fineract

Mentors

@Ankit Raj Ojha, Ashutosh Singh @Victor Romero

Category

Web - Mifos X Online Banking App | Core Development

Overview & Objectives

In 2020 we worked on the next revision of our online banking app, upgrading its dependencies and refining the architecture.. Our online banking app is an Angular web app powered by self-service APIs allowing for account creation, logging in, viewing of account details, transferring between savings accounts, repaying loans via savings accounts, applying for new loans, and more.

Given the high amount of adoption of Fineract 1.x for loan management use cases, for this year’s project we’d like to create a version of the online banking app which is solely focused lending use cases so Mifos can provide a customer-facing loan management portal. This will be a valuable community resource that others can use for demonstrations or to white-label to provide their customers to log into the self-service portal and view their existing active loans, view transaction details, repayment history, repayment schedules, etc, view details of previous loans, initiate repayments on their loans, calculate the payoff amount of their loans, apply for new loans, view loan account statements, etc.

LoanPro provides a valuable resources on what a simple loan management portal could offer at https://help.loanpro.io/article/fcflgkwnxn-customer-website

Description

• Focus for 2023 includes:

  • Completion of Refactoring Started in 2020 - Upgrading to latest version of Angular and corresponding dependencies

  • Enhancing overall user experience and design of application

  • Creation of a new repository that contains only the loan management self-service capabilities

  • Refine and implement the self-service loan management features listed above:

  • Incorporate better visuals and charts and dashboards around loan history

    • View their existing active loans

    • View transaction details, repayment history, repayment schedules, etc

    • View details of previous loans

    • Initiate repayments on their loans

    • Calculate the payoff amount of their loans

    • Apply for new loans

    • View loan account statements, etc.

  • Deploy the APIs (back-office or self-service APIs) securely (i.e. API Gateway)

  • Implement capabilities to configure a more customized look and feel of the app (upload logo, etc.)

  • Leverage ongoing security enhancements in Fineract to provide better self-service user management

  • Ensure the app can easily be embedded or integrated into existing tools of institutions using this.

  • Bonus: Enabling self-service external transactions through Payment Hub EE integratio

  • Bonus: Adding new support features to make app more user friendly.

  • Bonus: Integrating with newly created Open Banking API layer which replaces the self-service APIs mapping to existing and newly created APIs

    • Integrate with Fineract 1.x via Open Banking API layer on WS02 API Gateway

    • Map APIs to Open Banking APIs including integration of additional APIs

Helpful Skills

Angular development, SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, HTML, CSS

Impact

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

Other Resources

Previous GSOC Efforts:

• 2020 Progress: https://gist.github.com/manigedit/bca72537151afde40a3246776cb22503

• 2019 Progress: https://gist.github.com/CajetanRodrigues/b2b14b55f0f2c97ea276eb764209c4d9

LoanPro Customer Loan Website: https://help.loanpro.io/article/fcflgkwnxn-customer-website

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

Source Code - https://github.com/openMF/web-self-service-app and https://github.com/openMF/online-banking-app

Complete Details can be found here: Self Service Web Application

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

Mifos Webinar on Open Banking API: 

Mifos Open Banking API Documentation: https://app.gitbook.com/@mifos/s/docs/

Further Ideas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KXDSrBkuYA9g694-DE4qf1QKFcAhWwA-HNnn9YAucbk/edit?usp=sharing

Mentors

@Bharath Gowda

Overview & Objectives

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

This project would extend off of the work of a previous GSOC intern in building out integration with Saiku.

Description

The data and information housed in the centralized Mifos database is critical to the operations and management of a financial institution. While Mifos X ships with more than five dozen standard report and has multiple ways to build custom reports, non-technical staff who don’t know SQL queries nor the structure of the database struggle to be able to access new reports on the fly. Integration with Saiku would allow for ad-hoc reporting or more simply a drag and drop interface for management and non-technical staff to easily slice and dice and create reports on the fly.

Helpful Skills

Database Management Systems, MDX, SQL,

Impact

Data drives a microfinance institution - the more powerful and robust analytical tools management has, the better they can tailor their services and outreach to impact the poor most effectively.

Other Resources

Saiku Analytics Demo - demo.analytical-labs.com
Wikipedia OLAP Article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olap
Introduction to OLAP - http://www.db-class.org/course/video/preview_list
Gentle Introduction to MDX - http://www.iccube.com/support/documentation/mdx_tutorial/gentle_introduction.html

• Apache Fineract 1.0 Github Repo

• Saiku Github Repo

• https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=73632010

• Ad Hoc Reporting Builder Tool

• GSOC Idea Description

• Demo of Integration from 2014

• Saiku Website - http://community.meteorite.bi/

• Documentation on Work led by Oleg in 2014

• JIRA Issue for Oleg’s Work: https://mifosforge.jira.com/browse/MIFOSX-1448

• Source Code from Oleg’s Work

• Discussion on Saiku and Challenges to Overcome

• Discussion on Saiku

• Demo of Mifos with Salesforce Reporting

Mentors

@Vishwas Babu AJ

Category

Platform

Overview & Objectives

Mifos X and the Apache Fineract platform already provide a range of sophisticated financial accounting needs, however for organizations that use it as both their core banking system and accounting system all in one, they continue to need other features. While Mifos X never intends to replace an ERP or accounting package, we do want to continue to add additional functionalities that provide the necessary integration with the portfolio and general accounting functionality to support a financial institution's core operations.

Several features have been requested by users and partners that we've grouped together as one task. Applicants should be familiar with the stack as well as the accounting and financial services domain.

Some of this work will include finalizing and incorporating existing pull requests and contributions that have been made by partners.

Description

These enhancements will all be built into the Apache Fineract platform as part of or enhancements on top of the existing accounting module which provides full configuration of the chart of accounts, support for cash and accrual accounting, automated integration with the portfolio accounts and financial mappings, and single and compound journal entries to the general ledger. New enhancements include:

• Recurring Journal Entries (see spec below)

• Bank Reconciliation

• Fixed Asset Register

• Improved End of Period Processing

Helpful Skills

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

Impact

Better internal control and financial transparency

Other Resources

Recurring Journal Entries Design 

Fixed Asset Register

End of Period Processing

Bank Reconciliation Module

Mentors

@Maek Twain

Length

Large - 350 hours

Category

Platform - Modules | Exploratory

Overview & Objectives

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.

Description

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 accruing.

2. Utilize Data Tables to enable a user to initiate an insurance claim with details of the 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

This will also be helpful for intern;

An insurance claim is a formal request made to a Financial Institution asking for a payment based on the terms of an insurance policy. It would be nice for MFIs to provide a range of insurance products such as Health insurance, property insurance, casualty insurance, etc so that their members claim these. The insurance claims module has the following workflow;

1. Member claims insurance

2. MFIs verifies and validates member claims

3. MFI provides coverage/compensation to the insured.

Helpful Skills

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

Impact

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

Other Resources

See http://www.openunderwriter.com/

See Insurance Product

• Getting Started Docs

• Fineract 1.0 Github Repo

• Investopia Article On Insurance Claims

• Insurance Claim Definitions

Mentors

TBD

Category

Platform - Apache Fineract 1.0

Overview & Objectives

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 grown. Their core system needs to provide more and more CRM-type functionality that compliment the portfolio management and financial/social reporting that 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

Description

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 options to click-through to get the complete history of each request.

Helpful Skills

familiarity with Mifos X tech architecture, angular js,node js, java,Spring, Backend Integration

Impact

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.

Other Resources

• Apache Fineract Github Repo

• Odoo Open Source Business Apps Github Repo

• Odoo Third-party API And Demo

• Wikipedia Article on CRM

• What Is CRM ?

• CRM

Mentors

TBD

Category

Platform - Apache Fineract Develop | Loan Module

Overview & Objectives

Right now Loan Engine of Fineract offers flexibity of configuring various types on loan products such as housing loans, micro finance loans, gold loans, education loans, interest bearing loans etc which makes fineract the popular explored LMS platform
Now with increasing demand of Digital credits/LOC, addition of this feature would become a key part in driving digital organization towards exploring Fineract platform and making fineract future ready.

Objective is to Enhance the existing loan product engine to support Line of Credit Feature.

Description

The Line of Credit is a blessing for those who need financial aids at regular intervals. In this system, the borrower can apply for a particular loan amount from a bank but he or she needn’t take the entire amount in one shot. Once the loan amount is approved, the borrower can take a small amount out of the entire fund for the present need and keep the remaining amount with the bank. The interest will be charged only on the amount that the borrower has withdrawn and not on the entire amount. As a result, the customer can manage his or her monthly expenses easily without getting burdened with the loan EMIs.

In this lending system, the borrower also has to pay a lower interest rate compared to a traditional loan. It is like a credit card where you can pay the charges only for the amount that you have used and not for the entire credit limit.

Suppose, the bank has sanctioned Rs.50,000 to you based on your LOC application, and from the approved amount you have taken out Rs.10,000 as per your requirement. In such an instance, you have to pay the interest amount for only Rs.10,000 and not for the total amount and he could borrow again any number of times upto his sanctioned limits

Helpful Skills

Familiarity with Mifos X tech architecture, angular js,node js, java,Spring, Backend Integration, Line of Credit Business logic

Impact

Fineract will become future ready for Lending organizations are shifting gears to Futurestic Digital Credit Line lending

Other Resources

• Getting Started Docs

• Apache Fineract Github Repo

• Line of Credit Products and Enhancement details

• Mifos UI Github Repo

• Wikipedia Article on LOC

Mentors

@Nayan Ambali, @Ed Cable @Rahul Pawar

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform - Modules | Core Development

Overview & Objectives

Mifos is a very strong loan management system but has room to improve around loan origination features. Credit Bureau integration is one of these key features to build upon. 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).

Description

During the 2016, 2017, and 2020 Google Summer of Codes, Nikhil Pawar and Rahul Pawar completed the credit bureau integration module with integrations for the major credit bureaus in India and Myanmar. 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.

Helpful Skills

 SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Web Services, Big Data (Hadoop, Hive)

Impact

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.

Other Resources

For the scope of this project for 2022, see https://jira.apache.org/jira/browse/FINERACT-734

Detailed requirements https://goo.gl/aZWMZa

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

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

Mentors

@Ed Cable @Mohit Bajoria @Jose Hernandez

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Web 

Overview & Objectives

For our Payment Hub EE integration layer and payment orchestration engine, we provide an operational user interface which allow staff of the financial institution participating in a real-time payment scheme to manage view detail of the incoming and outgoing transactions that are flowing through the switch, manually process refunds, complete reconciliations, view and take action on unsuccessful and disputed transactions, and more. 

Description

Intern will improve the operations app user interface for the following use cases.

• Transaction Details View

• Transaction Reconciliation

• Refund/Reverse transactions

• Operational Metrics and Dashhboards

• Business metrics and Dashboards Account Details

Helpful Skills

Javascript, CSS, HTML5. Angular and Bootstrap (CSS framework) is plus

Impact

Reference UI for microfinance institutions on Apache Fineract CN

Other Resources

Usability and Design

Use Cases - https://github.com/openMF/digital-bank-ui/wiki/Use-Cases-&-Requirements

Github

https://github.com/openMF/digital-bank-ui

https://github.com/openMF/digital-bank-ui/issues

Mentors

@Rajan Maurya , @Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Mobile - Apache Fineract CN  | Core Development

Overview & Objectives

Just as we have a mobile field operations app on Apache Fineract 1.x, we have recently built out on top of the brand new Apache Fineract CN micro-services architecture, an initial version of a mobile field operations app with an MVP architecture and material design. Given the flexibily of the new architecture and its ability to support different methodologies - MFIs, credit unions, cooperatives, savings groups, agent banking, etc - this mobile app will have different flavors and workflows and functionalities. 

Description

In 2021, our Google Summer of Code intern, Varun Jain worked on additional functionality in the Fineract CN mobile app. In 2022, the student will work on the following tasks:

• Continuing migration to Kotlin

• Incorporating more external transaction flows through Payment Hub EE

• Improving notifications generation in the app.

• Enhancing the customer onboarding and loan origination user experience I

• Refining the UI and look and feel of app.

• More robust survey and data capture features.

• Integration with external ID systems for biometric verification

• Integration with voucher generation.

• Improve GIS features like location tracking, dropping of pin into the app

• Improve offline mode via Couchbase support

• Write Unit Test, Integration Test and UI tests

Helpful Skills

Android Development, Kotlin, Java, Git, OpenJPA, Rest API

Impact

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.

Other Resources

1. 2021 GSOC Progress: https://gist.github.com/varsvat/be08d5234770b1c22d809177564a6276

2. Repo on Github:

   1. https://github.com/apache/fineract-cn-mobile

3. Fineract CN API documentation:

   1. https://izakey.github.io/fineract-cn-api-docs-site/

   2. https://github.com/aasaru/fineract-cn-api-docs

   3. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Fineract+CN

4. How to install and run Couchbase:

   1. https://gist.github.com/jawidMuhammadi/af6cd34058cacf20b100d335639b3ad8

5. GSMA mobile money API:

   1. https://developer.mobilemoneyapi.io/1.1/oas3/22466

6. Payment Hub:

   1. https://github.com/search?q=openMF%2Fph-ee&amp;ref=opensearch

7. Some UI designs:

   1. https://www.figma.com/file/KHXtZPdIpC3TqvdIVZu8CW/fineract-cn-mobile?node-id=0%3A1

8. 2020 GSoC progress report:

   1.  https://gist.github.com/jawidMuhammadi/9fa91d37b1cbe43d9cdfe165ad8f2102

Mentors

  @Abhilash G @Shashank Priyadarshi

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Mobile - Mifos X Android Field Operations App

Overview & Objectives

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 2020, our Google Summer of Code intern, Shashank, added support for instant search, optimized the UI, added language support through locale, added dark mode support, extended support for Kotlin in the app, and added  KYC/Client Onboarding feature.

For 2021, the functional focus for the application would include:

cus for the appbuilding out new functionalities, UI enhancement to the application, and providing widespread coverage of automated testing throughout the app.   

Functional enhancements for 2021 include: 

• Improved GIS features

• Improved Task Management 

• Support for external payments via Payment Hub EE

• Deeper integration of the notifications framework

• Integrating SMS communications (Sms Communication will be in the form of in-app push notifications. User will receive a push notification is three case:

  1. Triggered (when user has applied for a loan and the loan get approved then user will receive a notification)

  2. Scheduled (when we want that user should receive a notification on a scheduled date and time).

  3. Direct (when users receives a notification when loan payment is overdue or a happy birthday wish on his birthday

• Improved Task Management 

This would all be on top of the Android SDK  on the Mifos platform.

Helpful Skills

Android development, SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Kotlin

Impact

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.

Other Resources

2020 Progress: https://gist.github.com/robustTechie/85e9fde225be7926a77b1dd08c9906d1

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

Architecture overview: 

https://github.com/openMF/android-client/wiki/Project-architecture-overview

Code style conventions guide:

https://github.com/openMF/android-client/wiki/Code-style-conventions

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

Mentors

@Courage Angeh, @Victor Romero

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform - DevOps | Infrastructure

Overview & Objectives

The increasing need for fast and reliable access to financial services has prompted the expansion of Apache Fineract from a single complex financial platform to a platform constituted of multiple micro-services that interact and scale to meet up with this increased need - Apache Fineract CN. Apache Fineract CN is a digital financial application platform built to render financial services to consumers in a fast, reliable and scalable manner. Deploying this platform such that consumers get the latest features with no reduction impact requires an optimized release cycle in a CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous Deployment) environment.

Description

In view of that, last year Courage began this work by implementing the needed scripts to containerize and deploy the Fineract CN services using Docker, Docker compose and Kubernetes. For the Google Summer of Code 2020, you are required to complete this work by performing the following task:

• Improve Docker-compose deployment configuration to deploy on a swarm node

• Implement new Fineract service to generate RSA keys and complete the provisioning process.

• Improve provisioner and migration script to work with both a swarm cluster and a single machine running multiple compose services.

• Build and publish the Fineract images on Docker hub.

• Link Docker Hub to Github service repositories via an Automation Server pipeline.

• Publish the built Fineract CN services libraries to a Maven Artifactory so developers will not have to manually clone and publish these services by themselves.

N.B: 

• I would like to hear the applicants own ideas.

• The task for the completion of this project may change depending on input from the community, the mentors and the applicant.

Helpful Skills

Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Bash, Java - Spring, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Cassandra, TDD With JUnit 4, Gradle

Impact

Provide a CI/CD pipeline to mange the the release of Apache Finerect CN microservices

Other Resources

Vendor pages

GSoC 2018: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2018/projects/5060024451727360/

Mentors

@Maulik Soneji, Ashutosh Singh, 

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Web - Mifos X Web App, Core Development

Overview & Objectives

Now that we have a robust mobile banking and online banking application which allows for users to self-create their own accounts, we need to add better back-end administrative support for staff of the financial institution to manage their self-service operations including user management, notifications to clients, task management, logo uploads, etc. 

Description

This project would involve front-end development of the new UI screens (some part has been already been implemented but may be enhanced) and development of additional APIs on the Apache Fineract back-end to support the following use cases:

• User Management - creation of new users, reset of user password, user activity tracking, searching of users, freezing/closing of self-service user accounts

• App configuration - upload of custom logo, look and feel, about app details.

• Customer Support/Communications - schedule campaigns to be delivered as in-app notifications, respond to incoming client support requests

• Task Management - view and respond to pending tasks - new loan applications, loan disbursements, etc.

Helpful Skills

Javascript, CSS, HTML5. Angular, Angular Material, Flex Layout

Impact

Improved usability and staff control for self-service operations.

Other Resources

Mentors

Godfrey Kutumela

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform | Infrastructure

Overview & Objectives

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.

Description

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.

Helpful Skills

Candidates applying for this project would ideally have prior experience in penetration testing, and document this in their application.

Impact

Re-assuring the more Entreprise-y type Mifos clients that they can safely bet on Mifos X as an MFI platform.

Other Resources

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

Mentors

Rachit Kansal

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform & Modules - 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.

With the advent of blockchain concepts and technologies, it is not ideal but imperative that we shift from the traditional identity management to a more secure decentralised claim-based identity management system. This kind of system has multiple benefits:

• 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

See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=103093257  for details on the proof of concept 

P0 requirements

1. Setup and run an Hyperledger Indy Network with Stewards.

2. Opening a bank account scenario.

3. Applying for a loan scenario.

P1 requirements

1. Performing money transfer to a merchant online.

Helpful Skills

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

Impact

Other Resources

• Sovrin: https://sovrin.org/

• Indy Getting Started: https://github.com/hyperledger/indy-sdk/blob/master/docs/getting-started/indy-walkthrough.md

• Sovrin Whitepaper: https://sovrin.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Sovrin-Protocol-and-Token-White-Paper.pdf

• Sovrin Stewards: https://sovrin.org/stewards

Mentors

@Bharath Gowda

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform - Modules - Data Migration | Exploratory

Overview & Objectives

Data migration can be one of the most challenging and time-consuming phases of an implementation of a core banking system. It's often a barrier to financial institutions moving on to new and better more modern systems. It's critical to cleanly migrate over the historical data of a client and their transactions. Often the legacy system data needs to be cleaned up and transformed before it can be migrated into Mifos X and is one of the most costly and time-consuming phases of a deployment. We have the beginnings of a migration tool from Mifos X to Mifos I/O (Fineract CN) 

This project would extend the existing tool to provide a standard migration path. 

Description

Extend the existing Mifos to Mifos I/O migration tool 

• Write ETL scripts to get data and transform data it from Mifos X to Mifos I/O format. 

Helpful Skills

Java (Spring/JPA/Jersey), SQL , JavaScript , Git, Pentaho, Kettle,

Impact

It has many impacts

1. This drastically reduces the time to set up of initial configuration/data of Mifos I/O for organization adopting this system as MIS.

2. It dramatically lowers the cost of implementing a system like Mifos I/O by reducing the complexity of the deployment

3. Provides a clear migration path to help community move from Generation 2 to Generation 3 architecture. 

4. It increases transparency by ensuring financial institutions using Mifos can retain the full history for their clients.

Other Resources

https://github.com/openMF/fineract-cn-data-import-demoserver

https://github.com/openMF/fineract-cn-data-import-ui

Mentors

@raul.sibaja @Aleksandar Vidakovic @jeremy engelbrecht

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform - Modules | AI | Exploratory

Overview & Objectives

For many of our users today, chat is a much more familiar form of user interface for them and it would be valuable to provide an extensible chatbot connected to Mifos/Fineract that could be used to both provide customer support as well as allow clients to directly interact with their accounts. See this post from ThitsaWorks for more: https://medium.com/@thitsaworks/chatbots-the-emergent-and-effective-tool-in-financial-education-f6e63baf9188

Description

This project will focus on building on the latest version of the chatbot. In 2019, our GSOC intern, Anshul extended the Mifos Chatbot and Adapter with better authentication, improved Natural Language Processing, and integration with the Slack, Telegram and Facebook messenger platforms. 

The project will include both leveraging other open source libraries and components to build the chatbot and building the adapter to the chatbot for MIfos/Fineract which will act as the interaction between chatbot and Mifos. It will take the replies from chat and feed them into Mifos. The program will sit in between Mifos and Chat.

Main components needed are:

1. NLU (natural language understanding) /NLP (natural language processing)
   This componentcomponent is probably a good candidate for integrating a suitable existing OS project. 

2. Chat platform and/or protocols
   To establish the communication between user and the bot logic the project could either leverage (at least) one of the major chat platforms (e. g. Facebook messenger etc.) and/or use open source protocols like XMPP or IRC. It's probably best to evaluate existing chat frameworks/client libraries 

3. Fineract adapter
   This is the part where most of the student's attention is needed (see use cases below). The student would have to evaluate to which extent a chatbot framework could be integrated or if there are better arguments to develop something Mifos specific.

Note: only Apache license compatible libraries/frameworks/components can be used.

It will cover the following use cases: 

• Enquiry of Loan Details

  • Mifos/Chat adapter will allow authenticated user to enquiry details of loan based on loan ID.

  • Check user/client authentication

  • Get MFI name, 9-digits loan ID (xxxxxxxxx), 9-digits clients ID (xxxxxxxxx) if it is an authenticated user/client.

    • Allow authenticated user/client to query loan details:

    • Status of loan

    • Outstanding principal and interest

    • Next due date, due principal and interest

    • Previous payment date, principal and interest (the last transaction of loan)

    • Loan maturity date

    • Overdue loan principal and interest (if have)

    • Number of days in arrears for loan

    • Penalty fees/charges

    • Client activation date

    • Loan disbursed date/amount/interest

    • First repayment date

    • Saving balance

    • Saving interest (to date amount)

    • Next meeting date

  • Enquiry of Savings Details

    • Saving activated date

    • Saving balance

    • Saving interest (to date amount)

    • Last active transaction date

  • Notifications through Chat Adapter

    • Notification will be sent thru Mifos/Chat adapter to respective clients on the following events occur on their accounts. 

      • Client account activation

      • Client account rejection

      • Loan disbursal

      • Loan close

      • Next due principal and interest (1/2 days in advance)

      • Payment posted (there may have delay due to data entry)

      • Next meeting date

      • Saving deposit

      • Saving withdrawal

      • Saving close

      • Update/delete details of clients (address, phone number, NRIC number)

      • Update/delete details of group (group name, group leader, loan officer name)

      • Upload documents

  • Enquiry about Loan Products

    • Check user/client authentication

    • Get MFI name, 9-digits clients ID (xxxxxxxxx)

    • (Provide a list of available loan products of MFI)

    • Allow authenticated user/client to query loan product details based on selected product:

      • Loan term

      • Interest rate

      • Max and min allowed amount to borrow

      • Number of installments/repayments

  • Enquiry about Group Information

    • Mifos/Chat adapter will allow authenticated user (group leader) to enquiry on group member details.

    • Check user/client authentication.

    • Get MFI name, group leader name, group ID, center ID, branch name, (Is a group leader?)

    • Allow authenticated client(group leader) to query group details:

      • Next meeting date

      • Clients who have overdue loan

  • Enquiry about Branch Information

    • Mifos/Chat adapter will allow authenticated user(branch manager) to enquiry on branch details.

    • Check user/client authentication

    • Get MFI name, branch manager Name, user id/name, Branch Name, (Is a branch manager?)

    • Allow authenticated branch manager to query branch details:

      • Number of clients of his/her branch

      • Expected disbursement principal (today)

      • Outstanding principal and interest

      • Saving balance

      • Number of clients awaiting for disbursal (today)

      • New registered clients (today)

      • Prospective clients (as of today)

      • Number of clients (dormant) as of today

      • Number of village/bloc/ward in a branch

Helpful Skills

SQL, Java, Git, Spring, OpenJPA, Rest

Helpful: technical knowledge of (any) chat protocol (e. g. XMPP, IRC), experience with NPU/NLP

Impact

Other Resources

2019 Progress: https://gist.github.com/iosdev747/2b7de87cd9b028bb97433ee2e26ad18d

Source Code: https://github.com/openMF/mifos-chatbot

AI/NLU services
Google: https://dialogflow.com/
Facebook: https://wit.ai/
https://botkit.ai/
https://www.ambiverse.com/
https://github.com/ambi-verse/nlu-api-client-java

Frameworks
https://github.com/howdyai/botkit
https://github.com/nitroventures/bot4j
https://dev.botframework.com/
Has a lot of information on integration with chat platforms/protocols: https://github.com/BotMill

NLP/NLU components and tools
https://opennlp.apache.org/
https://deeplearning4j.org/java-ai
https://github.com/AIMLang/aiml-java-interpreter
https://nlu.rasa.ai/

Tutorials
https://dzone.com/articles/building-an-intelligent-chatbot-using-botkit-and-r
https://dzone.com/articles/beginners-guide-to-creating-chatbots-using-dialogf-1
https://tutorials.botsfloor.com/

Other
Extensive comparison: https://chatbotsjournal.com/25-chatbot-platforms-a-comparative-table-aeefc932eaff
Seems outdated, maybe helps with some insights/inspiration: http://www.zionsoftware.com/products/jbuddy/botframework/

Mentors

@Sanyam Goel

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform - Fineract CN | Infrastructure

Overview & Objectives

The aim of this project is to provide a visual display of the Fineract CN API Documentation. We are now starting to use more of the Postman toolset for our developer portal and this project would focus on extending the existign work that was done. 

Description

This project involves providing a visual display of the API Documentation of Apache Fineract CN. Student would have to optimize documentation snippets ( .adoc ), document any service which isn't completely documented like template and reporting, document failing unit tests too and develop a visual website where these html files will be hosted.

Skills

Java, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Cassandra, TDD With JUnit 4, Spring REST Docs, Asciidoctor, HTML/CSS, Graphic Design

Impact

A visual presentation of the Fineract CN APIs will be a key building block for an enabling environment for developers working on Fineract CN.

Other Resources

https://github.com/aasaru/fineract-cn-api-docs

Mentors

@Nayan Ambali @Rahul Goel @Paras Dhama

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform - Modules | AI | Exploratory

Overview & Objectives

In 2022 Harsh extended the efforts of Apporva as documented here - https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/spaces/~62ecf99350bd9783f62bd9db/blog/2022/09/11/3186425918

In 2019, Appoorva built out the alpha version of this project including the initial app and machine learning model for image processing.  In 2020, Yash made this a functional application. The student for 2023 would extend the application and refine the model to achieve the original vision. Build out an AI-powered tool that leverages Machine Learning and Google's Cloud Vision to capture responses for the 10-question Poverty Probability Index (PPI) Scorecard using the simple image capture via a smartphone camera.   Social Performance Measurement is a critical tool for financial inclusion providers and the PPI is a widely-accepted tool for capturing it. Student would work on training the model for analyzing these images based on the scorecard requirements for multiple PPIs. 

Description

The Poverty Probability Index (PPI^®) is a poverty measurement tool for organizations and businesses with a mission to serve the poor.  The PPI is statistically-sound, yet simple to use: the answers to 10 questions about a household’s characteristics and asset ownership are scored to compute the likelihood that the household is living below the poverty line.

Recording the answers to these 10 questions on initial onboarding of a client and at future period intervals is fraught with manual human error and data integrity issues. Leveraging Cloud Vision, a field officer would simply have to take a series of photos with their smartphone camera inside and outside of the house and then the Cloud Vision would be able to deduce based on the images the response to the 10 questions (i.e. the presence of soot on the walls would denote a coal-base stove is using, the image could easily depict what material the roof is made of, the image could detect the BMI of the family, the image could detect if there is a TV in the household. 

Cloud Vision won't be able to answer every single question in each 10-question scorecard but for some it would. 

Helpful Skills

Machine Learning, AI, Data Science, Statistics

Impact

More widespread adoption of Social Performance Measurement and Increased Efficiency and Improved Data Integrity by reducing manual data entry for PPI scorecard capturing. 

Other Resources

2020 GSOC Output

• Source Code: https://github.com/openMF/ppi-vision

• Summary: https://gist.github.com/yashk2000/b471cf090b739d901bf723a1741c9b40

About the PPI

• https://www.povertyindex.org/about-ppi

• Getting Started with the PPI: https://www.povertyindex.org/get-started-ppi

• Sample Scorecard (India PPI based on 2016 data)

About Google's Cloud Vision

• https://cloud.google.com/vision/

Mentors

@Nayan Ambali

Length

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Platform & Web

Overview & Objectives

Financial Inclusion providers need a comprehensive view into the overall livelihood of their client both for better risk analysis, credit scoring, as well as social performance management.

Description

We have the back-end in place for a surveys/social performance management framework that allows the import of XMLs for the PPI (progress out of poverty index) SPM scorecard. We need to implement a front-end UI for viewing and recording PPI surveys as well as a UI in which to create new surveys from scratch (similar to Question Groups in an older version of software).

1. Build out the UI for creating survey from available PPI scorecard

2. Capture/record surveys from a given entity in the web app

3. View recorded surveys from the web ap

4. Interface to create new surveys from scratch via the UI

See Resources below for specs/wireframes.

Helpful Skills

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

Impact

Ability to measure social impact and have one single point of information on a client within the platform.

Other Resources

See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Social+Performance+Management+Framework

These are the legacy docs on the old question group functionality: https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/MIFOS/Question+Groups+and+PPI
and http://www.flossmanuals.net/mifos-user-manual/how-to-add-a-question-group/

Wireframes

Mentors

@Nikhil Pawar @Victor Romero

Medium - 175 hours

Category

Framework - Apache Fineract CN, Security 

Overview & Objectives

As our product is core banking platform and our clients are financial institutions, we strive hard to make our code base as secure as possible. However, due to ever increasing security threats and vulnerabilities, it is the need of hour that we analyze our code base in depth for security vulnerabilities. During pull request merge process, we have a process in place wherein we do peer code review,QA and integration tests. This practice has been very effective and our community is already reaping the benefits of such a strong code review process. However, we should test our code against the standard vulnerabilities which have been identified by reputed organisations like Mitre to gain more confidence. It has become a critical part of independent and partner-led deployments

Description

We can make use of opensource tools like Jlint, Findbugs , SonarQube or frameworks like  Total output Integration Framework (TOIF) - used by companies dedicated to produce military grade secure systems. As our environments become more containerized we can also utilize tools like: Anchore, Snyk.io, and Docker Bench for Security

It would be worthwhile, if we can dedicate one GSOC project for this analysis. The student would be responsible to analyse the findings, generate reports, identify if it is really a bug and then submit a fix after consultation from the community. Of course, the student needs to demonstrate some basic understanding of security vulnerabilities( like buffer overflow etc) and should have some academic level of experience working with static analysis tools.

Helpful Skills

Java (Spring/JPA/Jersey), SQL , JavaScript , Git, Apache POI

Impact

Improved security keeping the integrity and privacy of the underbank's financial data intact.

Other Resources

Static Analysis of Apache Fineract Project- A GSOC project idea

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