Season of Docs - 2023

About Mifos

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

What is Mifos and What Does our Community Do?

How is the Mifos software used? 

2023 Season of Docs Timeline

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

2023 Proposal - Improve Developer Experience for all Contributors & Innovators  

About the Mifos Initiative

The Mifos Initiative is a global 501(c)3 fintech non-profit leveraging the cloud, mobile & open source community to democratize financial services worldwide and digitally transform the world’s 3 billion poor and underbanked. Our mission is to scale the development and impact of inclusive fintech through an open community to advance the financial health of these 3 billion underbanked. 

Mifos has pioneered open source banking technology for the past fifteen years transforming the entire sector at each major stage of evolution from microfinance to financial inclusion to digital financial services. Mifos guides the open source community, steers the roadmap, and stewards the vibrant ecosystem of organizations building solutions on top of Mifos and Apache Fineract. Our building blocks for banking, recognized as digital public goods and digital public infrastructure to achieve the UN SDG of No Poverty, make core banking commoditized infrastructure, empowering any organization, anywhere to embed any financial service to any customer via any channel. 

These building blocks provide the common functionalities for creating customers, managing wallets, savings and loan accounts, orchestrating payments, and  maintaining the financial ledger & reports. Highly scalable in the cloud, our composable modular platform architecture is delivered via a set of Open APIs and reference mobile and web apps for staff and customers.

We guide the global Mifos ecosystem of partners and volunteers contributing back to the open source Mifos and Fineract platforms. Mifos donated the codebase to the Apache Software Foundation for what ultimately became the top-level project, Apache Fineract. Across the public sector, we are a critical digital public good to advance digital public infrastructure for financial inclusion such as G2P Payments:

• Nomination and selection of both Mifos and Fineract by the Digital Public Goods Alliance as foundational digital public goods for the Financial Inclusion Community of Practice

• Initial partners of the G2P Connect movement led by Co-Develop Fund

• Guiding the design and implementation of the Payment Building Block for GovStack led by ITU, DIAL, and GIZ

• Active participant in the Digital Convergence Initiative led by Universal Social Protection. 

• Launching OpenG2P with DSTI and UNDP and now co-leading it with MOSIP. 

Mifos was chosen as an MIT Solver for the 2021 Digital Inclusion Global Challenge and awarded the 2021 Banking Tech Award for Mifos X for Best Contribution to Economic Mobility in Banking & Finance and the 2022 Banking Tech Awards for Payment Hub EE for Best Contribution to Economic Mobility in Banking & Finance. More than 25 million clients are reached by 500+ financial institutions across 56 countries using solutions powered by its APIs.

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

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

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

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

Our Problem & Need

Based on learnings from our previous Season of Docs participation and the progress made in 2021 with documentation consolidation and the progress made in 2022 around technical documentation for the revamped Fineract and Mifos releases, our 2023 Season of Docs will focus on documentation to improve the Developer Experience for all contributors and innovators of our project. 

As the breadth of our solution stack grows from microfinance to loan management to core banking to payment orchestration and the breadth of our use cases supported extend behind the private sector to public sector use cases around Digital Public Goods and Digital Public Infrastructure like G2P Payments, the need for improved documentation to enable a smooth developer experience is ever growing.

The audience for this improved developer documentation includes many different stakeholders and developer personas ranging from:

• New Contributors - volunteers, interns, or anyone new to the project seeking how they can contribute to the the various solutions we have around core banking, mobile wallets, payment orchestration, G2P payments, etc. 

• Developer Training - as financial institutions, integrators, governments, fintechs or any consumers of our software, start to use our 

• Partner Onboarding - Local system integrators and partners deploying, localizatin, hosting, and supporting solutions powered by our open source projects need to self-equip themselves with the requisite knowledge and need better orientation in doing this a technical level. 

• Fintech Innovators - Fintechs of all sizes need to be able to imagine and bring to life the many different DFS and fintech solutions that can be powered by our building blocks and require a smooth developer experience and sandbox environment to do so. 

• Customers - For the IT staff of public and private sector customer evaluating our solutions and DPGs, they need a smooth and optimal experience to test out and experience our software. Evaluating the syste