Partner Spotlight – Fiter

In this month’s Partner Spotlight we are featuring Fiter – one of our most globally distributed partners. Fiter truly exemplifies the collaborative spirit of the community as it was borne out of the partnership between two long-time Mifos community members, Robert Jakech and Javier Borkenztain. As the team continues to bring on customers from fintechs and financial institutions around the globe, their team has continued to grow, with Mifos community members joining their team, as well as brining fresh new talent into the community. Fiter is active throughout the community and committed to being a lead contributor to Mifos and Fineract. They are also one of our first partners to make a financial commitment back to the long-term sustainability of the Mifos Initiative by pledging a portion of their revenues as a donation. 

This regular blog series will shine the light on some of our top Partners. Not only do we want to recognize them for their accomplishments, we want others to learn from the approach they’ve taken to promote and implement Mifos.

Mifos Partners are one of the most crucial links in our community – they are the driving force that is promoting and supporting Mifos worldwide.  Aside from championing our product and bringing the Mifos technology to new markets, they act as the fundamental bridge feeding in MFI requirements to be developed by the community. Partners don’t stop there as many are also developing and localizing the product to fit their local market.  For all these reasons, we focus our full energy on making Partners successful – they are the primary channel to market, the eyes and ears on the ground, and the entrepreneurial force that will help us sustainably scale. We’d love to recognize your partner organization in this monthly spotlight so please reach out if you’d like to be featured.

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2019 Google Summer of Code Wrap-Up

Another Google Summer of Code has come and gone again and as our intern community grows it’s hard to keep up with sharing back with the community the product of their efforts. This year we worked with our biggest class of Mifos Initiative GSOC interns with 14 and also worked directly with 2 Apache Fineract GSOC interns and 2 Outreachy interns with the support of DIAL. Apart from the valuable code contributions our interns make, they are a critical organic growth engine for the community which has helped to yield some of our most impactful contributors to the community like Avik Ganguly of Fynarfin. So give them a big shout-out via the lists or social media and encourage them to keep on contributing and fighting poverty with financial inclusion.

This year our students worked across the entire stack from back to front-end on top of both of generations of Mifos/Fineract. On our mobile apps, we added new functionalities, enhanced the user experience, integrated with external payment systems and did refactoring across our mobile field operations app for Fineract and Fineract CN, our Mifos Mobile mobile banking apps for Finerct and Fineract CN, our mobile wallet app, and a new Fiinwallet app contributed by Fintecheando. On the web app front, we had two interns continue rewriting the web app into the latest version of Angular and continued enhancing our Online Banking App. On the back-end we hardened Fineract by tackling some of the backlog, updated our Swagger API documentation, integrated our payment hub with the GSMA mobile money APIs and continued to push the frontier of new innovation with enhancements to our chatbot, machine learning-based scorecard, and a new mobile app to capture the PPI using cloud vision and automated detection of objects in images. On the back-end of Fineract CN, we completed the removal of Category X dependencies to prepare for a 1.0 release of Fineract CN. Our Outreachy interns worked on our community infrastructure by migrating our Mifos mailing lists to a Discourse forum and our user manual to a Gitbook user manual.

This post highlights their work with links to their final reports. We’ll also be conducting a couple showcases to demo their work so please register for the Showcase on October 4 or the Showcase on October 8 at 1300GMT via Zoom Webinar.  Our reflections post will soon follow to help you get to know these interns and keep them immersed and involved in the community.

Thank You!

Before we take a closer look at the results of the summer, we want to first off thank everyone who made Google Summer of Code another successful year.

Google Open Source Programs Office

First off we want to once again thank the Google Open Source Programs office for giving us the opportunity to participate once again in Google Summer of Code. Our mentors, Rahul and Tarun, are looking forward to seeing the entire team at the Mentor Summit in Germany this October!  We are always impressed by the awesome job they do in coordinating such a massive global collaboration handling all the moving pieces so smoothly. We look forward to participating in GCI and GSOC for many years to come!

Mentors & Co-Org Admin

A huge thank you to all our mentors who are the most critical piece of the puzzle in having a successful Google Summer of Code. Without our mentors being there at each step of the way to help guide our students in their journey, we couldn’t get through the summer. A big thank you to Rahul Goel especially for stepping up as Co Org-Admin and really being on top of ensuring all our student evaluations were submitted on time by mentors. We are eager to grow our mentor participation for next year so welcome any community members who’d like to make the leap, to step forward now!

Thank you to our mobile development mentors – Rajan Maurya, Tarun Mudgal, , Naman Dwivedi, Abhilash G, Anamika, and Ishan Khanna. Thank you to our web development mentors – Gaurav Saini, Pranjal Goswami, Kelvin Okome, and Ankit Ohja.  Thanks to our mentors on the platform side – Avik Ganguly, Nayan Ambali, Aleksandar Vidakovic, Lalit Mohan, Steve Conrad, Courage Angeh, Rahul Goel, Sanyam Goel, Raul Sibaja, Karina Munoz, and Victor Romero. Thank you to our Fineract CN mentors –  Isaac Kamga. Thank you to Courage and Ruphine for their Outreachy mentorship.

DIAL & Outreachy

Thank you to DIAL for supporting one of our Outreachy interns and to the Outreachy general fund for supporting the other – the meaningful contributions our interns made will greatly impact the community.

Our Interns

Last, but certainly not least, thank you to our interns from across the globe who poured their energy into their projects. This year they were ever-perseverant in working on brand new codebases, changing requirements on the fly, and working on experimental solutions. What is always most rewarding is seeing how collaborative and supportive the interns are of each other helping to solve coding problems, helping with collaboration tools and just being great all-around community members. We wish them the best of luck in whatever they pursue next and look forward to their continued contributions to the Mifos Initiative. Already, despite the program being officially over, many of our interns have continued making contributions and wrapping up loose ends of their projects. 

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