Page History

What is this project about? 

...

The domain of fineract includes accounts, held by customers, with transactions made to those accounts. The types of accounts include credit accounts (e.g. loans to customers) and debit accounts (current accounts and savings accounts), and for credit accounts there are different kinds of interest rate or shared profit schemes.  There is other functionality that support use cases for teller operations, treasury management, accounting, portfolio management, authentication, account opening (including KYC), and similar topics that are common to a retail banking operation.  

Initially aimed at Microfinance Institutions (MFIs), Savings Cooperatives, and Credit Unions, the fineract solution is not limited to those specific institutions.  A number of finTech innovators have used fineract as their backend solution for offering "Direct Banking" or "Neo-Banking" solutions as well as for "Agent Management" in some contexts. The backend account transaction system is a common requirement in many systems in financial services. 

...

(For clarity, those using the mifos.org released solutions, prior to incubation at apache foundation, are not counted in this project.) Fineract is used by many small to medium sized financial institutions in dozens of countries.  Larger institutions are considering the use of fineract side-by-side with their existing core banking solution (CBS). The side-by-side strategy allows for innovative offerings to be done without the licensing costs usually associated with commercial CBS. Fineract has also been adopted by finTechs to be the backend transaction account engine, and is being used in testing-lab environments to assist with system integrations.  With proper hosting and front end dev, Fineract is suitable to Credit Unions, Microfinance Institutions, Agent Banking solutions, Savings Associations, Building Societies, Cooperatives, small Commercial Banks, NeoBanks, and Direct Banking solutions.  

Our vision is that these institutions may download and use directly, but perhaps more likely, to hire a provider or integrator to provide the complete solution to them. Our users are thus both the institutions where fineract is in place and the system integrators and vendors where fineract is a significant part of their offering. 

What is the difference between Fineract and Fineract-CN? 

...

Please see Contributor's Zone The Jira for the project is hosted (naturally) by Apache and is

There are two issue trackers.

• fineract1.x  at https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/FINERACT/summary 
• fineract-CN at https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/FINCN/issues/FINCN-26?filter=allopenissues 

A good thing to do is to review an open ticket, especially one with back and forth between devs on the listserv or one that is scheduled for an upcoming release. It is also useful to review existing pull requests (PRs). 

...

Every open source project has to adopt some way to come to agreement on new features, new code enhancements, new project directions and fineract now uses a lazy consensus approach.  In this approach, the changes and issues are raised and people are given time to reject or discuss the changes, and we rely on contributors to fully vett changes in an appropriate way and have their code reviewed.  

This is documented at Committer's Zone and Changing Processes .  Please note that we expect discussion on the listserv to be the primary mode of communication.  "If it didn't happen on the list, it didn't happen." 

I'm new to Open Source, what is this all about? 

Welcome.  You may want to first read something about how open source projects function (like this) and in particular how the Apache Foundation works. https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html.  If you are interested in contributing to the project, a good way to get started is to subscribe to the listserv, review the functional specs on this wiki, browse the issue tickets, and start to play around with a build of the software.  Open source can be a great way to find your community, contribute and get feedback, and put your work into public view.  This is true for both code and the variety of other content needed.  

Where do I find .... 

We get a lot of questions about where to find documentation or the answer to a specific thing.  We do appreciate when people take the time to try to find the answer before asking.  Once you have new content to propose, a ticket or an improvement to documentation, we encourage you to get involved on that. Not all contributions are code, take, for example, this FAQ. 

primary  mode of communication.