We have compiled a great 2026 Google Summer of Code Ideas List. This list is fresh ideas from our pool of Talented Mentors. If you have any questions please feel free to contact David Higgins Ed Cable or Dmitry Pankov . Whilst we might tidy up or add more information you can consider this list stable now.

We're looking forward to participating in Google Summer of Code for our fourteenth year. In 2025 we worked with a total of 23 interns through Google Summer of Code, Mifos 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 2026 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 is a focus area for GSOC in 2026 and Mifos has long been known for its projects evaluating how AI can both enhance our products as well as assist our community. We will again be looking having a number of AI and Machine Learning projects which will have a profound impact on financial services.

Mifos has an active AI community primarily organised through its AI for All Working Group. 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.

We strongly encourage potential participants in AI project internships to join our working group in advance and participate, due to the fast moving field of AI this will show not only interest but also the ability to assimilate and adapt to the fast moving tech, which is often something we have to do during the project period.

Security is an imperative when working with the delivery of financial services via core banking or payments orchestration. This is a focus of GSOC in 2026.

We have worked extensively with previous interns on security-related projects to penetration 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 expect to 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 X and Payment Hub EE are globally recognized digital public goods and listed as DPGs for DPI, they are also award-winning projects 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 (R) developer list if you think your project may be on the boundary with the Apache Fineract (R) Backend.

• Have proven you can install the existing relevant Mifos Product in an environment (environments are available for trial use for free by alot of cloud providers)

• Work on issues such as our starter issues by providing patches and pull requests.

• Follow the Mifos coding standards and code of conduct

• Make sure you document your work

• Attend daily standup on Slack as well as the weekly student check-in calls for Mifos Interns

• Freely open to communicating with community members on the public channels

• Mifos has a policy of declaring where you have used AI in your contributions just like any other attribution you would make.

• Mifos does not accept proposals/applications generated by AI we want to get to know you rather than an AI at this point.