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We're looking forward to participating in Google Summer of Code for our thirteenth year. In 2024 we worked with a total of 18 interns through Google Summer of Code and our Code for GovTech 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 2025 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, digitizing government to person (G2P) payments, mobile money and Open Banking APIs, deployment tools for the cloud, and our suite of cutting edge and web and mobile apps. Participating interns will get to work on our Mifos X core banking platform including the staff-facing web app built on Angular, a POC of a brand new React UI, our suite of mobile apps including field officer apps mobile banking mobile wallet apps built on Kotlin-Multiplatform, and integrations with 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 protocols 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 in addition to bleeding edge exploratory efforts around AI and the cloud.

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. We will also have project related to our newest product, Mifos Gazelle, our DaaS (DPI as a Solution) offering, providing a deployment tool to enable the rapid deployment and configuration of multiple DPGs for demonstration environments.

AI and Machine Learning will have a profound impact on financial services. 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 financial services for the Base of the Pyramid. This year we’ll try to explore agentic AI and how AI agents can guide financial service transactions on behalf of staff or customers. We will continue to refine and enhance our existing AI projects including a generative AI tool for interacting with our project documentation, a bank statement analysis module using AI, , credit scoring module using machine-learning, and a chatbot framework for improved customer support. New exploratory efforts will build upon existing leadership and expertise of our mentors and need across the sector include AI for agricultural credit scoring, generative AI for streamlining how to configure and extend Mifos X, using NLP to add additional language support to our chatbot, LAMs to enable initiation 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 existing and/or create new end user documentation, and AI for fraud detection and transaction monitoring.

Security is an imperative when working with the delivery of financial services via core banking or payments orchestration. We have worked extensively with previous interns on security-related projects to penetrateion test and harden our mission-critical platforms. The security and quality control experts in our community look forward to mentoring security-focused interns for all our projects as well as the emerging need for fraud detection especially as more institutions connect to real-time payments.

We have some major refactoring and modularization of Mifos 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 and ShadCN. 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 OpenSPP for Beneficiary Management, OpenFN for workflow automation, Mojaloop for Instant Inclusive Payments, MOSIP for Digital Identity and Tazama 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, connect into beneficiary management systems like OpenSPP and OpenG2P for social protection, add additional connectors for messaging formats like ISO 20022, deepen our integration with instant inclusive payment systems like Mojaloop, test out integrations with new solutions like Interledger Protocol and Rafiki, and leverage open payment and banking standards.

With the new category of smaller projects introduced in 2024, 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, Payment Hub EE and Mifos Gazelle 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