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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.  

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 the Mifos Initiative and how does it advance financial inclusion to the poor?

• What is Mifos X?

• How is the Mifos X platform designed?

• Watch how Mifos technology is helping end world poverty

• What do GSoC contributors work on for Mifos?

• What is it like being a GSoC intern for Mifos?

• Getting started Read about setting up the code and understand the basic concepts around MifosX.

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

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: