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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 schemes or shared profit schemes.  There is other functionality that support supports use cases for teller operations, basic treasury management, accounting, portfolio management, authentication, account opening (including KYC), and similar topics that are common to a retail banking operation.  

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Fineract was donated by Mifos.org, a US based charity with a financial inclusion mission. While many members of the PMC trace their attraction involvement to the project to financial inclusion, the intent of the project is to attract a range of innovators involved in offering account services to consumers everywhere. Financial services should be available to all. 

Open source allows for the project to build the needed building blocks that all kinds of financial institutions can use but we anticipate an ecosystem of providers taking this code and building solutions on top of it.  We encourage that and fully expect those builders to send their development priorities and in-house dev teams to the project.  We require that virtuous cycle. 

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(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   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. 

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In general we ask that you take the time to read the instructions and familiarize yourself with the listserv before posting questions about building the solution.  You can search the listserv archives at https://lists.apache.org/list.html?fineract.apache.org .  If you find something missing from the instructions, but all means do let us knowwe welcome contributions of that sort as well.  

How do I get up to speed on development tasks? 

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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). Pull Requests (PRs) are found here → https://github.com/apache/fineract/pulls 

What is our Consensus approach?  

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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.  

I represent a Company and want to contribute, how do I do that? 

As stated on  http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html, "companies and individuals can donate resources and be assured that those resources will be used for the public benefit".  If you have developers working at your company, you may encourage them to work on the project, but note that "All of the ASF including the board, the other officers, the committers, and the members, are participating as individuals."  and further "the ASF does not allow corporations to participate directly in Apache project management or other governance activities at the ASF; only individuals." http://community.apache.org/projectIndependence.html

I found a security flaw, where do I report that? 

Security is a mandatory feature in Apache projects. Please report your bug to security AT fineract.apache.org .