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What is this project about?
At Apache Fineract
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, our mission is to build, maintain and enhance a cloud-ready core banking system for robust, scalable, and secure operations of financial institutions. We believe in financial services for everyone, including the unbanked and underbanked.
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 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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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.
Check out our powered-by Fineract page.
Is this Mifos?
The Mifos Initiative, a 501c3 US Charity, contributed the code that forms the basis of fineract (this was developed by a community of mifos developers over several years), and the Mifos Initiative remains involved with a number of front end implementations (project wrapper in apache parlance) and other systems that run "on top of" fineract, including a payment hub and API management. Many of the developers are on both listservs. However, if you are looking for information on the latest mifos release, please proceed to: https://mifos.org/take-action/get-mifos/#download. Please understand that devs at fineract may not respond to questions about mifos code.
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What is the difference between Fineract and Fineract-CN?
Fineract-CN has been DEPRECATED. There was a good idea of a new architecture involving microservices and a re-write of the core fineract into separate components. As of January 2024, there has been no formal release of Fineract-CN. As a result, the community has voted to deprecate the project (May 2023) and to archive the repositories (January 2024).
Previously, we said Fineract 1.x is a mature platform with open APIs, while Fineract CN is a cloud native, microservice architecture also supporting open banking APIs. (Editorial: That was the plan)
Fineract1.x is a completely different code project from fineract-CN. In terms of github repositories, fineract1.x is contained in one repo, while fineract-CN is held in dozens of separate github repos - one for each microservice. In Fineract1.x the packages encapsulate the different functional blocks - e.g. accounts vs transactions, while in Fineract-CN these are separate microservices.
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Fineract CN operates on the principle that financial services are an innovative space and so each fineract microservice encapsulates a domain that can be combined with other microservices to create new platform offerings. Fineract CN microservices can be combined to create new software platforms for digital financial service providers. Fineract CN is still in its early days, but preliminary tests have shown that a simple single-instance laptop deployment of Fineract CN can process over 1000 transactions/second. Fineract CN also includes a fully Apache-licensed backoffice UI. (Editorial: After six years, Fineract-CN has been overtaken by developments in Fineract and has itself become stale code.)
Do I have to get the code to use the solution?
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- 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 (DEPRECATED)
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
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Fineract1.x Fineract User Zone
FneractCN FINERACT CN (DEPRECATED)
How do I get something changed in the code? How do I get a feature added?
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