Google Summer of Code 2024 Ideas
The Mifos Initiative was accepted as a mentoring org for the 2024 Google Summer of Code. We are continuing to update and refine our list of ideas and assigned mentors. Attend our AMA on March 7 at 1500GMT. Applications open up on March 18.
Get Stoked - End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.
- 1 Get Stoked - End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.
- 1.1 2024 Google Summer of Code - Get to Know Mifos
- 1.1.1 Core DPG Technology Stack
- 1.1.2 Digital Public Infrastructure
- 1.1.3 AI for All
- 1.1.4 Modularization on the Back and Front-End
- 1.1.5 Integrations & POCs
- 1.1.6 Payments
- 1.1.7 Small Projects
- 1.1.8 What is Mifos and What Does our Community Do?
- 1.1.9 Why Does Google Summer of Code matter so much to Mifos and what do we look for in contributors?
- 1.1.10 How is the Mifos software used?
- 1.1 2024 Google Summer of Code - Get to Know Mifos
- 2 Guidelines
- 2.1 Expectations
- 2.2 Prerequisite Skills
- 2.3 Source Code
- 2.4 Hints
- 3 Project Ideas
- 3.1 Large Projects
- 3.1.1 Refactor Android Client & Rewrite using Android SDK
- 3.1.2 Expand Unit Testing Coverage of Fineract with Cucumber Testing Framework
- 3.1.3 Functional Enhancements to Mobile Wallet for G2P Use Cases
- 3.1.4 Integrate Fineract Client with Workflow Engine
- 3.1.5 Extend and Evolve UI Library of common components across all Mobile Apps
- 3.1.6 Implement Kubernetes Operator for Mifos/Fineract and/or PH-EE
- 3.1.7 LAM (Large Action Model) for Fineract (AI)
- 3.1.8 Generative AI to Improve Mifos Documentation
- 3.1.9 Fraud & Risk Management & Transaction Monitoring POC (AI)
- 3.1.10 Open Banking/PISP Fintech App Framework Version 3.0 (GovTech)
- 3.1.11 Micro Front-ends Proof of Concept for Fineract 1.x & Mifos X
- 3.1.12 Mifos X Web App Enhancements
- 3.1.13 Mojafos Version 2.0 - Deployable Package for Mifos/Fineract, Payment Hub EE, and Mojaloop (GovTech)
- 3.1.14 Self Service Middleware SDK for Apache Fineract (Mifos Mobile, Mobile Wallet, Online Banking App)
- 3.1.15 Improve Robustness of Mifos X and Apache Fineract by Fixing Issues/Feature Requests in Backlog
- 3.1.16 Fineract Refactoring - Adding Type-Safe REST API Layer & Adding Type-Safe Native SQL Queries
- 3.1.17 Phase 2 of Lombok to Reduce Boilerplate Code and Mapstruct to map REST DTO to Entity Objects
- 3.1.18 Mobile Check Deposit Proof of Concept Using Moov Image Cash Letter
- 3.1.19 POC for Integration with Loan Decisioning (Lokyata, Begini, nTropy)
- 3.1.20 POC around Compose Multi-Platform Micro Front-End for Web and Mobile Apps
- 3.1.21 OpenG2P - Digital Identity Proof of Concept with MOSIP (GovTech)
- 3.1.22 Machine Learning Scorecard for Credit Risk Assessment Phase 6 (AI)
- 3.1.23 Digital Bank UI using New Micro Front-End Components
- 3.1.24 Mifos Mobile 6.0 - Mobile Banking App
- 3.1.25 Payment Hub EE - Replicable Mobile Money Connectors for Mifos Payment Hub EE
- 3.1.26 Mojaloop - Transformation Layer for GSMA Mobile Money API to Mojaloop Open API
- 3.1.27 Fix Critical Vulnerabilities from Static Analysis and Vulnerability Scanning of Apache Fineract 1.x
- 3.1.28 Online Banking App 5.0 - Customer Loan Management Portal
- 3.1.29 Ad Hoc Reporting Module/Business Analytics (OLAP)
- 3.1.30 Insurance Claims Module
- 3.1.31 Basic CRM Functionality - Inquiries/Complaints Module
- 3.1.32 Line of Credit Feature/Credit Line
- 3.2 Medium Projects
- 3.2.1 Performance Testing Tool/Harness for Monthly Costing & TCO of PH-EE
- 3.2.2 Bank Statement Analysis (AI)
- 3.2.3 Credit Bureau Integration Phase 5
- 3.2.4 Optimize Payment Hub EE Operations UI with new Micro Front-Ends
- 3.2.5 Android Field Operations App Functional Enhancements
- 3.2.6 Optimize Containerization & Deployment of Apache Fineract
- 3.2.7 Security Penetration testing for Payment Hub EE
- 3.2.8 OpenG2P - Digital Identity Proof of Concept on Sovrin & Hyperledger Indy
- 3.2.9 Mifos/Fineract Chatbot & Adapter 4.0 (AI)
- 3.2.10 Computer Vision Based PPI Tool Version 5.0 (AI)
- 3.2.11 Extend Surveys & SPM Framework
- 3.2.12 Community support through AI
- 3.2.13 Custom Fantastic Mifos Project
- 3.3 Small Projects
- 3.4 Timeline
- 3.1 Large Projects
- 4 2024 GSOC Mentors
- 4.1 In Progress
- 5 See also
2024 Google Summer of Code - Get to Know Mifos
We're looking forward to participating in Google Summer of Code for our twelfth year. In 2023 we worked with a total of 14 interns through Google Summer of Code and our inaugural Mifos Summer of Code across the back-end platform, our web and mobile apps, and our AI tools. We hope to continue building our next generation of contributors who are joining in our movement to fight poverty through open source software. We want you to be part of our mission of creating a world of 3 Billion Maries.
Core DPG Technology Stack
GSOC Contributors in 2024 will have the option to work on a variety of projects related to our end to end open source stack for digital financial services including open source core banking, generative AI for financial services, real-time payment and instant payment integration with Mojaloop and Interledger Protocol, digitizing government to person (G2P) payments, mobile money and Open Banking APIs, and our suite of cutting edge and web and mobile apps. Participating interns will get to work on our new front-end Mifos X web app built on Angular, our suite of mobile apps including field officer apps and mobile banking apps for Fineract, our mobile wallet and integrations with the GSMA mobile money API and Open Banking API. We will once again have projects related to our award-winning Payment Hub EE which provides an orchestration engine to connect to real-time payment systems like Mojaloop, ACH, and emerging payment protocol like Interledger. Given the core stack is mature in its functionality, we continue to focus GSOC projects on maintainability and deployability, security, improving developer experience, user experience optimization, and more.
Digital Public Infrastructure
With the international development’s sector deepened focused on digital public infrastructure, we are also seeking interns to contribute to our efforts with open source digital public goods for G2P payments like our Payments Building Block powered by Payment Hub EE and OpenG2P, the initiative we've helped to launch to digitize large scale government cash transfer programs and parallel projects for in-kind transfer and management of social registries like OpenSPP. This year, we’ll also have a heightened focus on AI as part of AI for All and Data Science for Good initiatives.
AI for All
AI and Machine Learning will have a profound impact on financial servics. It’s a key focus area of our community and we have a variety of projects that build upon our existing AI tools as well as exploratory ones to discover and innovate around the power Generative AI and LLMs and LAMs can have on digital financials services for the Base of the Pyramid. A number of ideas will focus on continuing to refine and enhance our existing AI projects including a chatbot framework for improved customer support, credit scoring module using machine-learning, and our vision PPI app using Cloud Vision API. Exploratory efforts underway in the community that build upon existing leadership and expertise of our mentors an need across the sector include AI for agricultural credit scoring, AI for bank statement analysis for credit decisioning, generative AI for streamlining how to configure and extend Fineract, using NLP to add additional language support to our chatbot, LAMs to enable intiatition of transaction flows via our banking apps, POCs to explore the usage of tools CoPilot to improve our developer experience and ease of extending Mifos, Generative AI to improve end user documentation, and AI for fraud detection and transaction monitoring.
Modularization on the Back and Front-End
We have some major refactoring and modularization of Fineract 1.x that contributors could continue to help with. As we modularize the back-end we are also moving towards modular resuable UI components across our web and mobile apps exploring the usage of new frameworks like Compose Multi-platform. Through re-usable UI components, cross-platform development, frameworks, and improving our mobile SDKs, we are seeking to significantly streamline the development and design of our mobile apps.
Integrations & POCs
Since the boundaries of fintech and financial services extend so far beyond the core we also have a number of interesting POC integration projects lined up by our mentors this year including POCs with alternative reporting engines, mobile check deposit POCs, workflow engine integration, integration with KYC automation frameworks, POCs for selfie verification, and more. We also will continue to deepen our integration with peer projects in the DPG and Financial Inclusion space such as Mojaloop for Instant Inclusive Payments, MOSIP for Digital Identity and eKuta for Fraud and Risk Management.
Payments
While both the back and front-end development of our core banking DPGs will be a major focus, we will have more projects this year on top of our Payment Hub EE which provides an orchestration engine to enable the ease and participation of fintechs and financial institutions into modern payment systems. This year we will continue to improve upon the user experience of our operations app and control center, make it easier to build mobile money connectors, deepen our integration with instant inclusive payment systems like Mojaloop, test out integrations with new solutions like Interledger Protocol and Rafiki, leverage open payment and banking standards.
Small Projects
With the new category of smaller projects, we do have a number of projects that are more research and POC-based including:
Alignment with emerging Open Wallet Standards
Integration with Open Banking and Open Payment Standards
Design and Adoption of new frameworks like Compose Multi-platform
Mifos is a globally recognized digital public good and an award-winning project that sits at the cutting edge of inclusive fintech and embedded finance. Mifos is the leader of the open source banking movement helping to commoditize core banking infrastructure enabling financial services to be embedded anywhere and everywhere.
The best way to understand what we do is to watch a few videos.
What is Mifos and What Does our Community Do?
Why Does Google Summer of Code matter so much to Mifos and what do we look for in contributors?
How is the Mifos software used?
Guidelines
Getting started Read about setting up the code and understand the basic concepts around MifosX.
Expectations
Contributors working on Mifos X will be expected to:
Get access to reasonable bandwidth, ie: have a fast, reliable Internet connection
Introduce yourself to, and discuss on, the mifos-developer mailing list , the #gsoc and #gsoc-aspirants channels in the Mifos Slack workspace, and the Apache Fineract developer list
Work on issues by providing patches and pull requests.
Follow the Mifos coding standards
Make sure you document your work
Attend daily standup on Slack as well as the weekly student check-in calls
Freely open to communicating with community members on the public channels
Prerequisite Skills
Basics
Be a quick learner
Be well-behaved, act in good faith and be of good humour.
Troubleshooting Wizard
Passion for writing beautiful code
Excellent communication skills
Knowledge of developer tools
such as a text editor, source control, how to build software
experience with specific tools will also help, such as Eclipse IDE, Git, IntelliJ
Mifos includes a wide variety of technologies, we do not expect a student to be an expert on all of these. But it will be helpful if you have some experience in some of these. Helpful skills (specific technology requirements vary with project chosen) and must be eager to learn and develop with the requirements:
Java, Spring, MySQL, Jersey & Hibernate
HTML, CSS, JavaScript (JQuery), Angular & Material Design
JUnit, REST-assured
Android
Source Code
Mobile App Overview: https://openmf.github.io/mobileapps.github.io/
Mifos X and Apache Fineract 1.0 (Gen 2)
Architectural White Paper: https://goo.gl/du7XhL
API Docs: https://demo.mifos.io/api-docs/apiLive.htm & https://www.fineract.dev
Web Hooks framework: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Hooks
Platform - Apache Fineract: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Mailing List
Web App - Mifos X: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Mailing List | Gitter Chatroom
Mobile App - Android Field Officer App: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom | Slack
Mifos Mobile - Android Mobile Banking App: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom | Slack
Online Banking App - Web: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom
MifosPay - Mobile Wallet Framework: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom | Slack
Mifos Payment Hub EE: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom
OpenG2P: https://github.com/openg2p
Hints
When you need help, ask for help after exploring all options on the web. We are very excited for you to join us, but we need to know that you're willing to put in the time and effort required to do your part. When you do ask, ask well.
Tips for a Good Application from former GSOC intern and Mentor, Ishan Khanna: https://hackernoon.com/7-things-you-need-to-know-to-ace-your-gsoc-proposal-8e422f2b6abe
Not sure if you are qualified? Download and build the code, then run the Platform and the Mifos X distribution.
Instructions for running the platform are in Getting Started Guide in the Apache Fineract Contributor's Zone
Getting started with the web app can be found in the Getting Started Guide
Email the mifos-developer mailing list with your questions and project ideas.
Install Skype for (generally infrequent) video calls. You'll need a headset for Skype, too.
Get started by solving few issues on Fineract here or for the web app here.
Project Ideas
In Progress
Our 2024 Ideas list is currently being refined. Stay tuned for additional updates.
2024 projects will be related to the Mifos X Web App, our mobile apps including our Android Field Operations app, our Mobile Banking app, or our Mobile Wallet App or our Online Banking App. There will also be projects focused on our Payment Hub EE payment orchestration engine and our efforts in Digital Public Infrastructure space around G2P Payments for Social Protection Some projects will also center directly around the Apache Fineract platform for financial inclusion and additional tools, features, or modules and integrations with solutions that sit around the core platform. All the Mifos apps and modules are built on top of the Apache Fineract platform, which Mifos developed and donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Fineract is the world's only open platform for financial inclusion and is banking delivered as a service via the cloud. Apache Fineract is a true platform in which the back-end is cleanly separated from the front-end and all core platform services are exposed through an API making it easy to develop new applications on top of the Apache Fineract platform.
Note: The Apache Fineract project is not managed by Mifos. The Apache Fineract PMC (project management committee) has recently made decisions to strongly focus on stability, quality, and maintainability of the platform. While the project will continue to welcome Pull Requests (PRs) from contributors, there is now a stronger expectation of independent quality assurance steps done prior to any code being accepted into a release branch. The fineract project is discussing the idea of an “experimental branch” as a way to allow for GSOC volunteer improvement to be have their work shown. GSOC volunteers should expect more scrutiny for any code submission, including full unit tests, regression tests, performance tests, and maintainability of the solution.
Large Projects
For 2024, GSOC projects can be of three durations - large (350 hours) and medium (175 hours) and small (90 hours). These projects are of the 350 hour duration.
Refactor Android Client & Rewrite using Android SDK
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 written using coroutines. The Android client will be the first of the Mifos mobile apps which consume the SDK, reducing repeated network layer code in mobile apps, improving developer experience, and making it easier to migrate to newer versions of Apache Fineract 1.x. |
Description | In 2024, The student will be working on implementing the following things:
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Helpful Skills | Android, Kotlin, Jetpack compose, navigation-compose, MVVM, coroutines, Flow, multi-module architecture. |
Impact |
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Other Resources | QA & Testing - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=195730042 |
Github | https://github.com/openMF/android-client https://github.com/apache/fineract |
Expand Unit Testing Coverage of Fineract with Cucumber Testing Framework
Mentors | @Aleksandar Vidakovic |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Platform | Core Development | Infrastructure |
Overview & Objectives | In 2023 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:
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Helpful Skills | Cucumber, Java, Spring |
Impact |
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Other Resources |
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Github | https://github.com/apache/fineract
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Functional Enhancements to Mobile Wallet for G2P Use Cases
Mentors | @Rajan Maurya @Avinash Vijayvargiya |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Mobile - Mifos X | Core Development |
Overview & Objectives | 2024 development will focus on refining our current Mobile Wallet to be a strong reference implementation of feature-rich and secure mobile wallet application for G2P use cases. While our mobile wallet is a powerful tool for all fintechs and financial institutions, we want to powerfully and simply demonstrate the ability for governments to disburse G2P Payments to highly functional mobile wallet and then be able to transact with that wallet by paying for bills, sending transfers, and paying for goods and services via merchants. 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 2023. 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 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, Rachit focused on refining the architecture, streamlining the design and implementing some of the G2P use cases. In 2024, we are targeting to make production-ready our cases for G2P, update dependencies, consume more uniformly our SDKs fix pending issues and introduce new features. Functional enhancements include:
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Helpful Skills | Android development, Java, Kotlin, Jetpack compose, 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 | 2023 Mobile Wallet Final Report: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xHDVzmxuBj5KA0vHiJS_UGrs0Zb6IrpqwRmSdW3uExM/edit#heading=h.h4y8eq18ezr9 2020 Mobile Wallet Progress: https://gist.github.com/devansh-299/e2041c07d9ab55a747391951e9090df4 Mobile Wallet Framework: Source Code | Issue Tracker | Gitter Chatroom | Slack |
Integrate Fineract Client with Workflow Engine
Mentors | @Aleksandar Vidakovic @Victor Romero |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Fineract Platform | Modules |
Overview & Objectives | Users of Mifos and Fineract have long had a need to have greater control and flexibility over creating loan and customer onboarding workflows that incorporate internal processes/steps as well processes involving external systems. This project would center around creating an external integration with a workflow engine such as Flowable or jBPM using the Fineract REST API as the glue. The Fineract Client library enforces the contract between the workflow engine and Fineract. Fineract Client and its REST API as the glue. The result would be a UI-driven workflow engine to allow non-technical users to define these new custom workflows where they could drag and drop the different steps of the process.
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Description | Assumptions:
Steps:
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Helpful Skills | Java, BPMN |
Impact | UI-Driven interface based on BPMN standard to allow for non-technical users to define customer onboarding and application workflows via a drag and drop interface. |
Other Resources |
Extend and Evolve UI Library of common components across all Mobile Apps
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:
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Description | In 2024, 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. Design enhancements to customer-facing apps include:
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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 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 |
Implement Kubernetes Operator for Mifos/Fineract and/or PH-EE
Mentors | Tom Daly |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Platform | DevOps | Payment Hub EE |
Overview & Objectives | The goal of this project is to improve the deployability of key projects of our stack like Mifos/Fineract and Payment Hub EE. Kubernetes operators give kubernetes application dev/ops a great deal of reliability and architectural control over kubernetes applications deployments. Reference https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/extend-kubernetes/operator/ for details on the benefits of Kubernetes operators. The benefits of Kubernetes operators can also be quite tangible and visibile by looking at those under development from peer projects in the financial inclusion space like Mojaloop vNext whom are building out a Kubernetes operator as a means to improve quality, simplify deployment, and improve reliability and testing. |
Description | This project would focus first on gathering the learnings around Kubernetes operators and their patterns. There are many good examples in existence to follow (i.e. Mongo, Kafka, etc). This learning around the design would compose 30% of the project. The next and major focus of the project would be to choose what to move from what’s currently only in Helm to an Operator. Likely there will still remain a small helm chart simply to deploy the operator. |
Helpful Skills | Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Bash, Java - Spring, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Cassandra, TDD With JUnit 4, Gradle |
Impact | DevOps and Sys Admins running our projects would experience a more simplified deployment with greater degree of control, improved quality of their builds and greater reliability and ease of testing. |
Other Resources |
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LAM (Large Action Model) for Fineract (AI)
Mentors | @jeremy engelbrecht |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | AI | Platform - Modules | Exploratory |
Overview & Objectives | The idea behind this project is to use a LLM to give command/prompts and have those commands fulfilled via selenium |
Description | Following the similar types of commands/actions that can be executed in Fineract via our chatbot, this project would use LLMs to determine the intent of a user and fulfill those actions in the Mifos/Fineract applications using a tool like Selenium. |
Helpful Skills | Python, LLM(Llama2 or similar), Selenium |
Impact | This would dramatically change the way individuals interact with financial services. It goes well beyond a chatbot by being able to engage with a tool that can apply for and initiate financial transactions via prompts. |
Other Resources |
Generative AI to Improve Mifos Documentation
Mentors | @jeremy engelbrecht @Lalit Mohan S |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | AI | Platform - Modules | Exploratory |
Overview & Objectives | Mifos and Fineract and the suite of core banking applications we provide are highly complex applications both from a technical and domain knowledge perspective. Maintaining documentation around installing, configuring and using the application is challenging and presents a steep learning curve. The goal of this project is to use Generative AI to create a Transformer such as LLM to have a Q&A with the organisation documentation. By having this LLM trained across the user manuals, wiki, ReadMEs, mailing list posts, forum posts, slack discussion, and documentation on our project, it would greatly simplify the experience for any implementer looking to use the software. |
Description | Intern would create a Transfer such as LLM trained on all the sources of technical and user documentation across our project such that implementers could intereact with the documentation in a QA style format. |
Helpful Skills | Hugging Face transformer, Llama2 or similar, Colab |
Impact | This would greatly simplify the process of configuring, deploying and using our core banking software across various use cases making the software and documentation more maintainable for the project and more usable for the customer base. |
Other Resources |
Fraud & Risk Management & Transaction Monitoring POC (AI)
Mentors | @jeremy engelbrecht @Lalit Mohan S @Aleksandar Vidakovic |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | AI | Platform - Modules | Exploratory |
Overview & Objectives | With continually growing adoption of Payment Hub EE to connect fiancial institutions using or not using Fineract into real-time payment systems, the likelihood of fraud is ever-growing. With all of this transactional data flowing into and out of Fineract, there is now also a wealth of data to analyze using rule-based and AI-based methods to detect transactional patterns and identify fraud. A lot of fraud detection and transaction monitoring happens centrally at the level of the payment switch but there’s quite a bit of value in analyzing this at the level of each individual DFSP and sharing this on-us transaction data back to the central payment switch or system Goal of this project would be to work on a proof of concept integration between Mifos/Fineract and Payment Hub EE with a FRMS solutino for fraud detection and transaction monitoring. Given the power and potential of generative AI for financial services, project shoudl explore the use of generative AI for the following areas as documented by Newron:
Project could also integrated with eKuta which although rule-based and not AI-based provides a powerful FRMS solutino that aligns and integrates nicely with IIPS like Mojaloop. |
Description | Intern would work on a POC integration to monitor and analyze data from real-time payment system flowing via Payment Hub EE into Fineract. Project could utilize generative AI to improve effectiveness of solutiona and can leverage existing efforts in the community to collaborate with eKuta solution. |
Helpful Skills | Hugging Face transformer, Llama2 or similar, Colab |
Impact | Real-time payments make the challenges and consequences of fraud ever more steep and severe. Using Generative AI to combat it and integrating with FRMS solutions will help the user base using Payment Hub EE and Fineract. |
Other Resources |
Open Banking/PISP Fintech App Framework Version 3.0 (GovTech)
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
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Helpful Skills | Android development, SQL, Java, Javascript, Git, Spring, OpenJPA, Rest, Kotlin, Mojaloop |
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 | Source code: https://github.com/openMF/pisp-app Figma Design Mockups: https://www.figma.com/proto/ZkQJHzXWfjZugpTtz1MFdt/Mifos-PISP-App?node-id=10-27&starting-point-node-id=101%3A32&scaling=scale-down&t=vtBsVklbforA4MiB-1 Previous Development:
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: Developer Zone Examples of Open Banking Apps: https://www.ft.com/content/a5f0af78-133e-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e |
Micro Front-ends Proof of Concept for Fineract 1.x & Mifos X
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:
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.
Primary efforts center around:
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.
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Other Resources | 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/ |
Mifos X Web App Enhancements
Mentors | @Karan Takalkar @Bharath Gowda @Pushpendra Kumar @Ramveer |
Category | Web - Mifos X Web App |
Overview & Objectives | Our 2023 intern, Pushpendra 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 | With the Mifos X 23.12 we release, we officially deprecated our Community App and replaced it with the Mifos X Web App. This was the culmintation of efforts over the the years - 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. In 2023, Pushpendra, created a layer to consume the auto-generated Fineract typescript client, completed all the oustanding screens, integrated Apache Superset partially, . Radha implemented the libraries for internationalization. Primary efforts center around:
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 2023 Progress: https://gist.github.com/PC-11-00/8f726c2a6719c7493accbaa58bcfb047 2022 Progress: https://gist.github.com/ramvr1256/11c197b038250e7394462e8687ef15f8 2020 Progress: https://gist.github.com/karantakalkar/7a4acb83f31ebfe4f3b827c86c67eec0 https://gist.github.com/muskankhedia/b0929cbf2ae6236bfe07964a140da179 |
Other Resources |
Mojafos Version 2.0 - Deployable Package for Mifos/Fineract, Payment Hub EE, and Mojaloop (GovTech)
Mentors | @Courage Angeh, @Victor RomeroTom Daly @Ed Cable @Elijah Okello |
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 maintain and enhance this deployable package, Mojafos. A major focus in this second year will be 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 | In 2023, Elijah Okello created a deployable package, Mojafos, 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:
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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
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Self Service Middleware SDK for Apache Fineract (Mifos Mobile, Mobile Wallet, Online Banking App)
Mentors | @Victor Romero |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Mobile/Platform |
Overview & Objectives | We currently have a self-service API layer which is valuable for demonstrating customer-facing actions that can be performed via mobile banking and online banking apps but these APIs were not intended for deployment in a live productino environment and are being deprecated for a more secure option.
Some of these effort will also align with previous efforts around Open Banking APIs. 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 UK 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 | In 2024, Intern would need to follow the existing architectural patterns of our SDKs and clients, and design a new one that exposes the appropriate APIs using coroutines and publishes them in a secure manner. 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 example:
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 secure middleware layer we can enable both 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 Open Banking Adapter: https://github.com/openMF/openbanking-adapte
Reference Open Banking Fintech App: 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 |
Improve Robustness of Mifos X and Apache Fineract by Fixing Issues/Feature Requests in Backlog
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 |
Fineract Refactoring - Adding Type-Safe REST API Layer & Adding Type-Safe Native SQL Queries
Mentors | @Aleksandar Vidakovic |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Platform, Core Development |
Overview & Objectives | Over the years as the breadth of functionality in Fineract has grown as support for more and more use cases was added, technical debt has continued to accrue, blocking the community from moving towards a fully modularized yet still monolithic codebase. This has hampered the developer experience, creating a high learning curve for even experienced developers due to how coupled together everything is and the cross-dependencies across the business logic. This project would focus on having interns contribute to major refactoring efforts to help address the technical debt and reduce all the boilerplate code that needs to be maintained. The first is adding a type-safe REST API layer(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FINERACT-2021 ) and the second, adding type-safe native SQL queries through the introduction of QueryDSL (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FINERACT-2022) . |
Description | This project would have the intern start on either of these two tasks which are documented in the Jira issues above. This project could involve multiple interns working in parallel. Progress on these two tasks would achieve the following benefits:
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Helpful Skills | Java, Spring, Gradle, refactoring large code bases, testing, SQL |
Impact | Improved developer experience and increased maintainability of the codebase by removing boilerplate code. Ease of maintaining auto-generated Java and Typescript clients. |
Other Resources |
Phase 2 of Lombok to Reduce Boilerplate Code and Mapstruct to map REST DTO to Entity Objects
Mentors | @Aleksandar Vidakovic |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Platform, Core Development |
Overview & Objectives | TBD |
Description | We introduced Lombok last year to tackle some technical debt, reduce boilerplate code and make the code base in general more readable. In the first phase we removed with the help of Lombok inconsistencies (typos, non-standard characters etc.) with getters/setters in entity and DTO classes. We use (and recommend) constructor based dependency injection for Spring, but in the past this created some really lengthy constructors. Lombok helped to reduced these significantly. This cleanup already helped a lot, but was only the preparation for our next steps of improvements. 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:
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:
All of these approaches are very manual (and error prone) and difficult to maintain. Mapstruct can help here:
Challenges:
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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 |
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Mobile Check Deposit Proof of Concept Using Moov Image Cash Letter
Mentors | @Victor Romero |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Mobile |
Overview & Objectives | As more and more implementers of Fineract use the platform for digital and neobank use cases, the ability to remotely capture check (i.e. mobile check deposit) becomes necessary. There are many proprietary solutions to achieve this but this project would aim to create a Proof of Concept that is completely open source to enable a neobank or any financial institution to offer to its members mobile check deposit capability. This would especially be relevant for the credit unions, community banks and smaller financial institutions that are adopting MIfos and Fineract as their core system. |
Description | This project would be built as a new module that is easily embedded or integrated into our Mifos Mobile self-service mobile banking app. It would consist of an open source tool for actually scanning or capturing the check deposit and use the Moov open source Image Cash Letter library to parse, create, and validating ICL files. Image Cash Letter (ICL) specifications provide Check 21 services and are designed to enable banks to handle more checks electronically, which should make check processing faster and more efficient. Traditionally, banks often physically move original paper checks from the bank where the checks are deposited to the bank that pays them. The overall process of translating physical checks to electronic messages is called Check Truncation. |
Helpful Skills | Java, Android,Kotlin, Compose, Go |
Impact | Ease of use for end user - enabling small financial institutions like credit unions to offer mobile check deposit at lower cost. |
Other Resources |
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POC for Integration with Loan Decisioning (Lokyata, Begini, nTropy)
Mentors | @Victor Romero @Aleksandar Vidakovic |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | Platform - Modules |
Overview & Objectives | Mifos/Fineract is a very robust and highly functional Loan Management System of Record. Typically adopters of the system will build their own or implement a third party tool to score their borrowers, analyze credit risk, and do their loan decisioning as part of their origination processes. Once this decisioning engine has determined eligbiility of the borrower, the customer and loan and ensuing lifecycle can then be managed in Mifos/Fineract. Mifos/Fineract can easily receive information from this decisioning engine and send information to the decisioning/scoring engine to faciilitate this analysis. There are a number of different best practice alternative and traditional credit scoring/decisioning tools that Mifos/Fineract could more tightly integrate with. By providing a working integration of plugin framework for integrating with decisioning, our community can have better access to decisioning tools to improve the health of their portfolios. This project would extend up on existing efforts to create a micro front-end approach for our UIs. As the userbase for Mifos/Fineract extends beyond just microfinance and financial inclusion we need to enable developers to easily build front-end user experiences that align with the wide variety of back-end use cases supported by our platform being used by MFIs, credit unions, banks, fintechs and governments. Additionally, many of the flow and screens used by staff as well as customers are common across mobile and web application. |
Description | This project endeavors to create a plugin framework for integration with external decisioning engines. It should identify, design, and build out the points of integration and interaction for inbound and outbound data flows at both the back and front-end for decisioning/scoring tools of both traditional as well as alternative sources of data. This work would include leveraging Fineract data tables for storing and displaying this external data, the respective webhooks, APIs, and events that are called or triggered during the scoring process. Likewise this project would dovetail well with our workflow engine integration as flows would be calling both of these systems. Traditional providers we could potentially build integrations with include Lokyata which provides more out of the box scoring or tools like nTropy which allow data enrichment to build ones one model. On the alternative side, we are exploring integration with Begini which provides pyschometric assesment data as well as behavioral and usage data from the phone to assess credit worthiness. Work would be be on both the back and front-end. |
Helpful Skills | Java, Spring, Angular, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, REST |
Impact | Cost-effective and modern decisioning to improve the health and creditworthineess of a loan portfolio. More replicable integration points with external systemn that can be followed for other integrations. |
Other Resources |
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POC around Compose Multi-Platform Micro Front-End for Web and Mobile Apps
Mentors | @Aleksandar Vidakovic |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | UI, Mobile |
Overview & Objectives | This project would extend up on existing efforts to create a micro front-end approach for our UIs. As the userbase for Mifos/Fineract extends beyond just microfinance and financial inclusion we need to enable developers to easily build front-end user experiences that align with the wide variety of back-end use cases supported by our platform being used by MFIs, credit unions, banks, fintechs and governments. Additionally, many of the flow and screens used by staff as well as customers are common across mobile and web application. |
Description | This project would aim build both the micro front-end framework and set of UI components that can be deployed as individual flows or end to end applications across both web and mobile. Recently emerging is the Compose Multiplatform which extends Jetpack Compose to work beyond just mobile devices. The current standard UI for Fineract is still the Web App which is the only one that covers 100% of the feature set. While based on Angular and more modern than our previous Community App, 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 for easy consumption by other developers. Documentation of the project could follow latest best practices (aka “Storybook”) Tooling should help with consistency and reduce handwritten code as much as possible. Using Monorepos is strongly suggested. |
Helpful Skills | JS, Android, Angular, E2E testing, Cucumber |
Impact |
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Other Resources |
OpenG2P - Digital Identity Proof of Concept with MOSIP (GovTech)
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.
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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
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 |
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Other Resources |
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Machine Learning Scorecard for Credit Risk Assessment Phase 6 (AI)
Mentors | @Lalit Mohan S @Abhijit Ramesh @Nasser Kaze |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
Category | AI, Platform - Modules, 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:
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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
Documentation https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Fineract+Credit+Scorecard |
Digital Bank UI using New Micro Front-End Components
Mentors | @Gaurav Saini, @Pranjal Goswami, @Maulik Soneji, @Giorgio Zoppi |
Category | Web - Micro Front-Ends (Update) |
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:
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
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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 | 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 |
Mifos Mobile 6.0 - Mobile Banking App
Mentors | @Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi @Garvit Agarwal @Saksham Handu @Paras Dhama @Rajan Maurya |
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 financial institution using Mifos to provide an omni-channel banking experience including smartphone-based mobile banking, USSD-based mobile banking, and online banking via a web app. Over the years our interns extended our mifos 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 Kotlin 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 | In 2024, 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:
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Helpful Skills | Android Development, Kotlin, Jetpack compose, Coroutines, Hilt, MVVM, Unit, Instrumentation Testing, 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 |
Payment Hub EE - Replicable Mobile Money Connectors for Mifos Payment Hub EE
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. We designed and implemented Payment Hub EE as a highly flexible integration engine and orchestration layer to allow the ease of connecting to new mobile money APIs by simply building new connectors. Across the ecosystem, PH-EE has been deployed in production for multiple mobile money networks including M-Pesa via Safaricom and other connectors. However it is challenging for others to easily build new connectors. This project would help to make the process for building a new mobile money connector more replicable. |
Description | This project would focus on making the process of building a connector more replicable, defining and templating the BMPN flows for inbound and outbound mobile transactions, properly documenting the process, creating a set of helm charts for deployment of Payment Hub EE for the mobile money integration use case. 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 has also served as the point of integration for all other external payment systems - the payment hub is extendable by additional payment connectors. |
Helpful Skills | Web Services, Java, SQL , JavaScript , Git, Sprint |
Impact | Great efficiency, reduced risk for clients, more impactful and relevant products & services. |
Other Resources |
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Mojaloop - Transformation Layer for GSMA Mobile Money API to Mojaloop Open API
Mentors | @Manoj VM@Subham Pramanik |
Category | Platform - Payments Integrations (Update with another project) |
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:
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 |
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Fix Critical Vulnerabilities from Static Analysis and Vulnerability Scanning of Apache Fineract 1.x
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:
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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: |
Online Banking App 5.0 - Customer Loan Management Portal
Mentors | Ashutosh Singh @Victor Romero |
Length | Large - 350 hours |
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 |
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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:
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 |
Ad Hoc Reporting Module/Business Analytics (OLAP)
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
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
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Insurance Claims 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:
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;
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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 |
Basic CRM Functionality - Inquiries/Complaints Module
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 |
Line of Credit Feature/Credit Line
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 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 |
Medium Projects
These projects are of a 175 hour duration.
Performance Testing Tool/Harness for Monthly Costing & TCO of PH-EE
Mentors | Tom Daly |
Length | Medium - 175 hours |
Category | Platform | DevOps | PH-EE |
Overview & Objectives | The institutions that need to deploy Payment Hub EE to connect into inclusive instant payment systems like Mojaloop or to connect into mobile money APIs are resource-constrained and need to optimize the cost of deploying Payment Hub EE as much as possible. This project would center around building out a bundled performance testing tool and harness to project and monitor monthly costs and overall total cost of ownership. |
Description | This project will consist of the following:
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Helpful Skills | Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Bash, Java - Spring, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Cassandra, TDD With JUnit 4, Gradle |
Impact | Cost and Resource-constrained implementers will have better visiblity and control over costs of deploying valuabe tools like PH-EE |
Other Resources |
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Bank Statement Analysis (AI)
Mentors | @jeremy engelbrecht |
Length | Medium - 175 hours |
Category | AI | Platform - Modules |
Overview & Objectives | Mifos is a very strong loan management system but has room to improve around loan origination and decisioning features. AI provides powerful means of analyzing credit risk of potential borrowers. Applicants simply need to upload their bank statements and then using OCR and NLP, information is used to categorize and. extract this data, score them and determine their loan eligibility in Fineract. |
Description | In this project one will use Natural language processing to categories various spend and credits on Bank statement using NLP and a decision tree. This would be developed as an add-on module for Fineract that attaches the analysis of bank statements to the records in Fineract via data tables. |
Helpful Skills | Python, XGboost |
Impact | More accurate and reliable means of assessing credit worthiness of borrowers that has a good user experience for the applicant/borrower as well. |
Other Resources | For similar work that has been worked on previously in the community, see: https://mifos.org/blog/powered-by-mifos-softidoc/ |
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Credit Bureau Integration Phase 5
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 2024, 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 |
Optimize Payment Hub EE Operations UI with new Micro Front-Ends
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.
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Helpful Skills | Javascript, CSS, HTML5. Angular and Bootstrap (CSS framework) is plus |
Impact | Reference UI for microfinance institutions on Apache Fineract CN |
Other Resources | Use Cases - https://github.com/openMF/digital-bank-ui/wiki/Use-Cases-&-Requirements |
Github |
Android Field Operations App Functional Enhancements
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: (Update for this year)
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 |
Optimize Containerization & Deployment of Apache Fineract
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:
N.B:
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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/ |
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Security Penetration testing for Payment Hub EE
Mentors | Godfrey Kutumela |
Length | Medium - 175 hours |
Category | Platform | Infrastructure |
Overview & Objectives | Mifos Payment Hub EE is continuing to grow in its functional capbailities and breadth of use ceases being adopted for. We must ensure it 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/ Run FindBugs & related tools for some serious static code analysis |
OpenG2P - Digital Identity Proof of Concept on Sovrin & Hyperledger Indy
Mentors | Rachit Kansal |
Length | Medium - 175 hours (Update) |
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:
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Description | See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=103093257 for details on the proof of concept P0 requirements
P1 requirements
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Helpful Skills | HTML, Spring, Hibernate, REST, Java, AngularJS, Javascript, SQL, Hyperledger Indy |
Impact |
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Other Resources |
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Mifos/Fineract Chatbot & Adapter 4.0 (AI)
Mentors | @raul.sibaja @Aleksandar Vidakovic @jeremy engelbrecht |
Length | Medium - 175 hours (Update to Large) |
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:
Note: only Apache license compatible libraries/frameworks/components can be used. It will cover the following use cases:
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Helpful Skills | SQL, Java, Git, Spring, OpenJPA, Rest Helpful: technical knowledge of (any) chat protocol (e. g. XMPP, IRC), experience with NPU/NLP |
Impact |
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Other Resources | 2019 Progress: https://gist.github.com/iosdev747/2b7de87cd9b028bb97433ee2e26ad18d Source Code: https://github.com/openMF/mifos-chatbot AI/NLU services Frameworks NLP/NLU components and tools Tutorials Other |
Computer Vision Based PPI Tool Version 5.0 (AI)
Mentors | @Nayan Ambali @Rahul Goel @Paras Dhama @Param Mirani |
Length | Medium - 175 hours |
Category | Platform - Modules | AI | Exploratory |
Overview & Objectives | In 2023, we had two Mifos summer of code interns working on both the application as well as the AI model for this project. In 2022, Harsh extended the efforts of Apporva as documented here - GSoC’22 Final Evaluation - Computer Vision Based PPI Tool Version 3.0 @ Mifos Initiative 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 | Focus for 2024 would be to continue refining the AI model for object detection using Google Cloud Vision as well as exploring new use cases that are more practically implemented for Google Cloud Vision and social performance measurement. 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
About the PPI
About Google's Cloud Vision |
Extend Surveys & SPM Framework
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).
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 |
Community support through AI
Mentors | @David Higgins @Ed Cable |
Length | Medium - 175 hours |
Category | Platform - Modules | AI | Exploratory |
Overview & Objectives | The community for Mifos related applications has grown considerably over the past few years. The applications are highly complex and implementors (especially those new to the projects) require support to be able to implement and develop these applications. Current support is via the Slack general channel and dispirate documentation, requests get different treatment depending who reads and responds. As there is no dedicated resource for monitoring and response which means timescales can be elongated. The objectives of this project is to setup an initial AI bot and learning algorithm that can respond to questions and point users to the relevant answers or documentation. This would need to be across the range of Mifos/Fineract products that the slack channel currently accomodiates it would require some pre-training of the algorithms based on past questions |
Description | Identify the best AI solution for the task. Create the AI PoC and train the algorithms Test its responses based on previous questions and answers. PoC could be limited to one product initially and have a breakout for additional assistance. Web integration e.g. chatbot could be added to websites. |
Helpful Skills | HTML, Slack, AI |
Impact |
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Other Resources |
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Custom Fantastic Mifos Project
Is there something missing from this ideas list that you want to do? Let us know! Send your project proposal(s) to the developer mailing list.
Small Projects
These projects are of a 90 hour duration.
Alignment with emerging Open Wallet Standards
Integration with Open Banking and Open Payment Standards
Design and Adoption of new frameworks like Compose Multi-platform
Alignment with Emerging Open Wallet Standards
Mentors | @Ed Cable @David Higgins |
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Length | Small - 90 hours |
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Category | Mobile Development |
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Overview & Objectives | Mifos and Fineract are valuable Digital Public Goods critical to advancing the Sustainable Development Goal of No Poverty by providing both the core banking system of record to manage the store of value for a functional wallet/transactional account in which to send G2P payments to. Many different financial services can be layered on these accounts within Mifos and Fineract making them a powerful tool for financial inclusion. Apart from providing the back-end to manage these wallets, Mifos also provides a reference mobile wallet which can be extended to one’s local requirements. Recently there have been a number of cross-sector movements to establish standards and frameworks upon which any type of wallet could be built. These wallets could be used for financial use cases, identity use cases, health use cases, etc but standards and frameworks initial focus primarily centers around secure sharing of credentials and privacy of user data. Mifos was a founding member of the Open Wallet Foundation and sits on the GovStack Wallet Building Block Working Group. |
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Description | This project would consist of researching the different open wallet standards emerging from the Open Wallet Foundation, GovStack wallet building block, and could utilize other digital public goods for identity including Inji from MOSIP and the Gluu Project. Research would include exploring the current status of the specifications, standards and designing a POC architecture for a mobile wallet that aligns with th standards and specifications in their current state. |
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Helpful Skills | Java, Android, Kotlin, Mobile Development, Enterprise Architecture |
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Impact | The OWF aims to set best practices for digital wallet technology through collaboration on standards-based OSS components that issuers, wallet providers and relying parties can use to bootstrap implementations that preserve user choice, security and privacy. (mission of Open Wallet Foundation) |
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Other Resources | Open Wallet Standards & Requirements Open Source Tools for Identity & Credential Sharing |
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Integration with Open Banking and Open Payment Standards
Mentors | @Ed Cable @David Higgins |
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Length | Small - 90 hours |
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Category | Payments | Platform - Integrations |
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Overview & Objectives | 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 UK Open Banking API standard which is being followed and adopted by a number of countriues through Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The Interledger Foundation now also has an Open Payments Standard. All of these standard have great applicability to how our core banking and payment orchestration systems authorize, establish consent, access date, and initaite transactions via these third party APIs and standards for sharing information and initiating transactions |
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Description | This project would consist of researching the all of the different open banking, open finance and open payment initiatives and their corresponding API specifications. The POC would consiste of designing and implementing ways in which Fineract could generate APIs that are compliant with these specifications and most importantly ways for Fineract and our Payment Hub EE to consume the APIs/standards for these initiatives. |
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Helpful Skills | Java, Android, Kotlin, Mobile Development, Enterprise Architecture |
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Impact | More innovation, control, and access as they can securely enable third parties to access their data and initiate transactions on their behalf. |
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Other Resources | Open Banking & Open Finance Standards & APIs
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Timeline
2024 GSOC Mentors
In Progress
The list of mentors for 2024 is currently being finalized.
We have a talented and passionate group of mentors from across our global community who are eager to help guide the next generation of HFOSS contributors. These mentors come from various backgrounds - partners deploying Mifos, financial institutions using Mifos, volunteers, and even former GSOC contributors but they all share a common goal of ending poverty one line of code at a time!
Mentor | Project | Location | Time Zone |
---|---|---|---|
Web | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
AI | South Africa | SAST (GMT +2:00) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Mobile | Spain | CET (GMT +1:00) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
AI | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Mobile | Canada | EST (GMT -5:00) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Web | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | USA | EST (GMT -5:00) | |
Platform | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | Mexico | CST (GMT -6:00) | |
Platform, Web, Mobile | Mexico | CST (GMT -6:00) | |
Platform | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | USA | CST (GMT -6:00) | |
Platform | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Mobile | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Web | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | Sri Lanka | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | Serbia | CET (GMT +1:00) | |
Platform | india | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Platform | India | IST (GMT +5:30) | |
Web | India | IST(+5:30) |