Google Summer of Code 2024 – End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.

This summer you’ll have the ability to change lives – three billion of them – one line of code at a time. The Mifos Initiative will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the twelfth time. Last year we had the honor and privilege of stewarding 14 interns in total – ten through Google Summer of Code and four through our inaugural Mifos Summer of Code.  Interns will not only have the opportunity to contribute to our social mission but also be able to work on cutting edge technologies being used by our ever-growing global community and ecosystem of fintechs and financial inclusion providers. Interns will be shaped by the open source experience led by our intrepid mentors, rewarded by our mission of fighting poverty with financial inclusion, and growing their professional skillset and experience to position themselves for future careers or entrepreneurial endeavors in fintech.

Google Summer of Code is a global, online program sponsored by Google focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development.  Interns accepted to the program will spend their summers coding from May 27th to August 26th and upon successful evaluations, receive a stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline – applications are open from March 18 through April 2! You can apply from our organization page.

To help aspiring applicants and answer any questions related to ideas or improving your applications and proposal, we’ll be holding a Mifos Google Summer of Code AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Thursday March 7 at 1500 GMT via Zoom Webinar .

You’ll have the have the chance to build web and mobile apps for digital financial services, contribute to our award-winning Mifos X open source technology platform powered by Apache Fineract, extend our modern payment orchestration engine, Payment Hub EE, enhance our Digital Public Goods for use cases like G2P, and pioneer innovative uses of Generative AI for advancing financial health.

As the scope of our digital public goods and breath of use cases of fintech adoption continue to grow, so does the variety of projects and technologies we have available for interns to contribute to. Once again we’ll be continuing to refine our suite of web and mobile apps for customers and staff – with a deep focus this year on cross-cutting tools to streamline the developer experience including extension of our auto-generated clients and SDKs. We will have a variety of projects on or around the Apache Fineract platform for back-end and full stack developers including core contributions and refactoring, new module development and integration. On the payments front, as Payment Hub EE gets deployed for more uses cases ranging from mobile money to instant inclusive payment systems to G2P, we’re looking to enhance deployability, ease of configuration, and performance to drive more adoption. Mifos has continued to establish a deeper presence as a catalytic digital public good for managing accounts, orchestrating payments and enabling digital payment adoption so we’ll have a growing number of DPG/DPI and Govtech related projects for Payment Hub EE and integration with other DPGs for use cases like digitizing cash-based social protection programs.

This year we’ll also have a deeper focus on AI projects as part of Mifos AI for All and Data Science for Good Initiative. AI can have transformative potential for financial inclusion and we are only starting to scratch the surface of what can be achieved. We look to expand our existing projects for credit scoring and chatbots with several new projects using generative AI and LLM and LAMs to improve customer support, design better products, better analyze risk, mprove the developer experience, detect and prevent fraud and more.

Want to learn more? Browse our ideas page for projects and links to all our code repositories.

What does the Mifos Initiative do?

Check out some of these videos to learn more about the Mifos Initiative:

A great introductory video that was made by one of our 2019 Google Code-in winners, Laxya Pahuja:

The Mifos Initiative is a global 501(c)3 fintech non-profit whose mission is to scale the development and impact of inclusive fintech through an open community to advance the financial health of the 3 billion underbanked. We lead the global community that builds, supports, and uses innovative solutions powered by Apache Fineract & Mifos X. Our unprecedented approach unites financial institutions, local technology partners, and volunteer developers to collectively advance open source banking infrastructure to sustainably build impactful innovations in digital financial services.  More than 30 million clients are being reached by 500 financial institutions & fintech innovators who use the Mifos software to power their operations across 65+ countries. They are supported by a global community of 100 deployment partners & hundreds of volunteers.

Our building blocks for banking, recognized as digital public goods (DPGs), make core banking commoditized infrastructure, empowering any organization, anywhere to embed any financial service to any customer via any channel. We provide the common functionalities for creating customers, managing wallets, savings and loan accounts, orchestrating payments, and maintaining the financial ledger  & reports

Our Mifos Digital Public Good suite includes a core banking platform, payment orchestration engine, and mobile banking interfaces that have disrupted how financial services are delivered enabling millions to participate in the digital economy for the first time, enabling the effective delivery of digital financial services such as savings and credit-led financial inclusion, G2P payments, instant payment integration, and more.  This suite is delivered as a set of Open Source Buildings Blocks for digital financial services consisting of re-usable and pluggable components that support the common core banking requirements. Our end to end open source architecture for digital financial services can power an an entire digital financial services ecosystem with multiple layers of open APIs at the solution and application level that fuel innovation on top of digital interoperable payment rails – Open Source Banking APIs for flexible account management from Mifos and Fineract, Open APIs for Payments Interoperability via Mojaloop, and app-level innovation enabled by Open Banking APIs and reference mobile apps.

We use open source technology and the power of community to scale financial inclusion worldwide to achieve our shared vision of creating a world of 3 Billion Maries, a world where each individual has access to the financial services to create a better life for themself and their family.

Why GSOC Matters So Much

Google Summer of Code is an organic growth engine which helps us grow our base of contributors long into the future. The talk we gave below highlights why GSOC is so important and what we look for in our students.

Why We Want You

• Be part of the broader HFOSS community working on projects to advance social good in the world
• Collaborate with a diverse global community of developers, local technologists, and on the ground financial-service providers.
• Develop a fond awareness of the challenges in bringing financial services to the poor and play a key role in helping to overcome them.
• Work on top of a modern technology stack built with leading open source frameworks like Java, Spring, MySQL, RESTful services, and more.
• Flourish professionally and culturally as you communicate and interact with our community and team of rockstar mentors.

Who We’re Looking For

We’re looking for interns who are not only going to come and make a big impact over the summer but most importantly grow into a regular contributor that is a part of our community long into the future. Since 2009, we’ve had a history of deeply embedding our interns into our community. We invest in your personal growth and development with a roadmap and journey that starts as an intern progresses toward becoming committers and maintainers in our projects, a role as future GSOC mentors, and career opportunities in the fintech space.

So when we bring you on for the summer, we’re looking to invest in you for the long term, so you can be part of achieving our mission for many years to come.

Keys to a Successful Application

• Immerse yourself in the community – introduce yourself, participate actively in Slack and on the mailing lists. We want to know what it’d be like to work with you so during the bonding and application period make sure we get to know you and how you fit into our community.
• Submit code – in addition to being an active participant to show how you’ll interact in the community, each student who wants to be seriously considered as an intern should submit at least one pull request via our repositories on GitHub.
• In-depth and thought-out application – show you’ve taken the time to understand financial inclusion and the challenges yet enormous potential of technology for our customers. We’re seeking students who are deeply passionate about our social mission and want to be long-term members of our community.

Pro Tips from GSOC Alumnus, Ishan Khanna

You can also read this great post that Ishan made on Medium titled 7 things you need to know, to ace your GSoC Proposal.

What You’ll Work On

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 and instant payment systems integration, digitizing government to person (G2P) payments, mobile money and Open Banking APIs, and our suite of cutting edge and web and mobile apps. 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 bleeding edge proof of concepts and exploratory projects.

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. Projects will center around optimizing the ease of deploying and configuring Payment Hub EE and integrating with other DPGs for use cases like G2P and P2G payments.

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. For our mobile apps, we are aiming to have single codebase with multi-modular feature implementation leveraging KMP (Kotlin 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, and leverage open payment and banking standards.