Meet the 2019 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns
Google Summer of Code
2019 is well underway. We are now just nearing the end of Google Summer of Code but we still would like to properly introduce you to this year’s class of interns – GSOC is now in its 15th year and Mifos has the honor of participating for the sixth time independently and eighth year overall. Once again this is our biggest year to date with a total of 14 interns participating in GSOC directly through the Mifos Initiative. In this post we’re also going to introduce you to two GSOC interns that are being mentored through the Apache Software Foundation as well as two Outreachy interns sponsored by DIAL and the Outreachy General Fund working on documentation projects.
We have six interns working on mobile apps, three interns working on web apps, six interns working on new modules or the back-end for Fineract, one intern working on Fineract CN, and two Outreachy interns working on migrating our mailing list to Discourse and converting our user manual to a Gitbook. Stay tuned for some upcoming webinars in which our interns will be showcasing their work to our community and Part 2 of this blog post giving a personal look into each of interns.
For our suite of Mifos Mobile Apps on Fineract and Fineract CN, we have six students continuing to extend them. Moksh Mahajan, under the mentorship of Tarun Mudgal, will be extending our Android Field Operations App to Version 6.0. Prashant Khandelwal is working Mifos Mobile 4.0, our mobile banking app, Shivansh Tiwari is working on Version of our Mobile Wallet, Saksham Handu, under the mentorship of Rajan Maurya, is working on Version 3.0 of Fineract CN Mobile while Abhijit Ramesh is working on Version 2.0 of Mifos Mobile CN. Lastly Manish Kumar is contributing to FiinWallet – a hybrid mobile wallet/banking app contributed by Fintecheando.
On the front-end, both Jivjyot Singh and Abhay Chawla are working completing the rewrite of the Mifos X web app into Angular 7 while Cajetan Rodrigues is working on Version 3.0 of the Online Banking app.
On the back-end for Fineract, we’re looking to wrap up some eagerly awaited projects and release some new Mifos X innovation, Sidhant Gupta is using the recently created Payment Hub to integrate with the GSMA mobile money API. Apporva MK is experimenting with some bleeding edge technology by building out a tool to collect the PPI by only taking images and using the Computer Vision APIs and machine learning to detect objects in those imagesk. Anshul Singth is refining the Mifos chatbot and helping to make it production-ready – Likewise, Supreeth S Karan, is continuing our machine learning project development a scorecard from credit risk assessment. Last but not least, Dylan Robson is hardening and strengthening Fineract and Mifos X by fixing some long outstanding bugs and feature request from our backlog.
Under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation, on Fineract CN, Ebenezer Graham, is continuing his contributions working to remove Category X dependencies. Kang Brader is updating and making production-ready our Swagger APIs.
Participating in Outreachy with the support of DIAL, we have two interns from Cameroon working on documentation and collaborative projects – Massabe Lydian Kengne is converting our user manual to Gitbook format and Kerlyn Manyi is migrating our old Mifos mailing lists and Google Groups to a highly collaborative Discourse forum.
Mobile Apps – Mifos X (Fineract)
| Prashant Khandelwal
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Shivansh Tiwari – India
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Moksh Mohajan – India
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Manish Kumar – India
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Mobile Apps – Fineract CN
| Abhijit Ramesh- India
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Saksham Handu – India
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Mifos X Web Apps
| Abhay Chawla – India
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Jivjyot Singh – India
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Cajetan Rodrigues – India
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Fineract & Mifos X Modules
| Sidhant Gupta –
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Dylan Robson – USA
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Apoorva M K – India
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Anshul Singh – India
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Supreeth S Karan
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Apache Software Foundation GSOC Interns
| Kang Brader – Cameroon
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Ebenezer Graham – Mauritius
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Outreachy Interns
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Kerlyn Manyi – Cameroon
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Massable Lydiane Kengne – Cameroon
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Mifos at OSCON 2019
The Mifos Initiative had the honor of being at OSCON hosting a booth in the non-profit pavilion of the Expo Hall for the ninth year this past month in Portland, OR. We also were able to continue telling our transformative story around Open Source Core Banking through a talk on the Business Summit given by Edward Cable, on Democratizing Financial Services and how Open Source Core Banking is enabling a multiplier effect. As we’ve done in the past, we like to share the firsthand experience of our Business Development intern at their first OSCON – read on below for a glimpse into Jackson Reed’s first time at OSCON.
Mifos and Mojaloop – an End to End Open Source Architecture for Digital Financial Services
I’m pleased to announce the ongoing collaboration between the Mifos Initiative and the Mojaloop community being funded by a strategic grant from DIAL (Digital Impact Alliance), and their Open Source Center. With the funding from DIAL, we’re embarking on the first step in our vision to create an end to end open source architecture for digital financial services, integrating Mifos and Mojaloop. Mojaloop provides the digital payment rails and Mifos provides the account management engine fueling innovation on top of them. Working with the team at DPC Consulting in Hungary, we have created a Mifos lab which provides a live environment for digital payment transactions to flow through a Mojaloop switch, initiated from accounts held at Digital Financial Service Providers (DFSPs) running Fineract and Fineract CN as their account management system. We had the honor and pleasure of joining the Mojaloop community and demoing this at the recent community convening in Arusha, Tanzania.
In Tanzania we could see the strong progress being made around the codebase and the growing force of the Mojaloop community. Post the convening, the tremendous momentum continued with a number of announcements centered around Mojaloop adoption across all segments of the financial services sector. The Central Bank of the Republic of Tanzania announced the development of TIPS, the Tanzania Instant Payment System, of which they’ve chosen to adopt Mojaloop as the basis for their same-as-cash electronic payment system. WOCCU announced its digital financial inclusion strategy to reach 50 million-plus people across Asia centered around a project to design interoperable, open-loop, low-cost, real-time payment platforms for its global network of credit unions across Asia, exploring the use of the Mojaloop open-source platform. Great progress is being made with the launch of Mowali, the mobile wallet interoperability initiative powered by Mojaloop, and led by Orange and MTN to enable interoperable payments across all of Africa. The DFS Lab Mojaloop Hackathon in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, in mid-April is fast-approaching and will give fintech companies an opportunity to develop and test innovative use cases on Mojaloop.
The Mifos Initiative looks forward to being an enabling factor in not only extending the functionality of Mojaloop and evangelizing the platform but most importantly enabling and accelerating adoption by providing a robust lab environment and a Mojaloop-ready open source toolkit of account management systems, mobile wallets and a payment hub to facilitate the smooth integration with the Mojaloop APIs. Our vision is to provide the account and wallet management capabilities for an institution that wants to connect to Mojaloop whether they’re a SACCO or MFI, a fintech company, a mobile wallet provider, or even a bank.
Thank you to DIAL for enabling this collaboration, the DPC team for their stellar work, the Gates Foundation for enabling our participation at the convening and the Mojaloop community and ModusBox team for all their support with the integration.
Mifos Partners with Corent Technology to Transform Delivery of Core Banking Platforms via SaaS
We’re excited to announce our collaboration with Corent Technology to transform the delivery of both our 2nd and 3rd generation Mifos solutions via the cloud through their SaaS enablement solution, SurPaaS®. We’re eager to work with community members that would like to pilot using Mifos X as a SaaS solution through Corent’s solution as well as partners who’d like to leverage the SurPaaS stack to deliver a cloud-hosted solution at scale. Please view the full press release or read on below:
ALISO VIEJO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Corent Technology, a technology leader in cloud migration, optimization and SaaS enablement, has teamed up with the Mifos Initiative to launch Mifos X financial application as a fully instrumented SaaS solution, to facilitate access to core banking services for the over 3 billion unbanked and underbanked world population, a major step toward eliminating extreme poverty in under-developed communities.
“We are pleased to support the Mifos Initiative – a leader in financial inclusion and microfinance technology – in their mission to enable financial institutions to bring responsible financial services to the over 3 billion people who are without effective access today,” stated Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology.
“Such a bold mission, serving potentially thousands of smaller financial institutions, requires a SaaS solution that is highly automated and scalable and that can be easily deployed, efficiently delivered and affordably managed. By powering the Mifos X Platform with the SaaS-enablement capabilities of SurPaaS, we are pleased to be a part of empowering this global initiative,” added Fatehi. Read more
Explorations: Yoti – Digital Identities as a Force for Good
This post is part of our Explorations series, where we invite experts from across the global tech community and our ecosystem to impart their wisdom and knowledge. Identity is a crucial part of delivering responsible fintech and a topic that is actively being discussed across our community right now. We’re happy to have Ken Banks, the Head of Social Impact at Yoti, share this guest blog post describing their recently announced social impact strategy. Ken will also be leading a webinar as part of our Mifos Community Webinar Series on March 18 at 1400GMT via GoToTraining outlining Yoti and its commitment to designing and delivering solutions that can make digital identity a force for good.
Please read his blog post below, explore the their social impact strategy (.pdf) and join the webinar on March 18. Mifos is looking for institutions across the community who are ready and willing to participate in digital identity pilots we will be kicking off with organizations like Yoti and the Sovrin Foundation.
Over the past few months our Social Impact team has been busy carrying out research across Africa, South East Asia and the United Kingdom to better understand digital identity needs and opportunities in these locations. We’ve been speaking to experts around the world and attending digital identity and humanitarian events to get a sense of who is doing what, where. Our findings have led to the development of an exciting user-focused, evidence-based Social Impact Strategy which we are proud to be launching today, along with an updated section of the Yoti website. Read more
Star Contributor of the Month – Abhay Chawla
This month we are extremely excited to recognize Abhay Chawla as our Star Contributor of the Month, and first of 2019! We are recognizing Abhay for his wonderful involvement in several areas of the Mifos community. Since wrapping up his Google Summer of Code internships, he’s stayed steadily involved with the community – spearheading the documentation and evangelism to onboard new contributors during Code for Good week. He then went on to serve as a mentor for Google Code-In, sharing his experience and wisdom with high school students. Now, he’s mentoring Chirag Gupta on an internship to bring to completion the web app rewrite he started. Abhay is always thorough, articulate, and patiently ready to guide others to contribute! Read more
Top 10 Mifos Moments of 2018
As 2018 comes to a close, it’s time to look back on the year that was. The growth of our ecosystem, both in scale of outreach and breadth of services and solutions continues to impress us – more than 10,000,000 individuals are now being reached by solutions powered by Mifos and Fineract! We finally began to tell that story on a grander stage, getting the word out at multiple conferences and getting recognized for different awards. While we didn’t ship many official releases, we’re ready to release the newest versions of our mobile wallet and mobile banking apps, the next release of Mifos X and are ready to jumpstart the community around Fineract CN.
As we heads toward 2019, we look to our vibrant ecosystem to help us take the Mifos Initiative to new heights – we’ll be working directly with partners to catalyze new solutions, we’ll be launching an association-based funding model to directly enable partners and users to help with ongoing sustainability, and we’ll begin executing upon our roadmap for Fineract CN, unlocking our vision of Financial Inclusion 2.0.
Here’s our list of the top 10 moments from 2018 in more or less chronological order.
Star Contributor of the Month – Chirag Gupta
This month we are extremely excited to recognize Chirag Gupta as our star contributor for the month, and last of 2018! Chirag is our youngest Star Contributor to date! After working with Mifos through Google-Code-In as a student in 2016, Chirag has continued to contribute ever since! This year he served as a Google-Code-In Mentor, where he has mad a tremendous impact helping guide students in the same way he was during GCI only a few short years ago. In addition to being a GCI Mentor, Chirag has helped Mifos in numerous ways, including fixing bugs in our mobile pay app and web projects. We couldn’t have done Google Code-In this year without Chirag – he was there to welcome and help nearly every student. Keep up the great work, Chirag! We love having you as a part of our Mifos family! Read more
