FAQ

What is this project about? 

Fineract provides a reliable, robust, and affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service providers to offer financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked. Fineract is aimed at innovative mobile and cloud-based solutions, and enables digital transaction accounts for all.  

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.  

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. 

Fineract was donated by Mifos.org, a US based charity with a financial inclusion mission. While many members of the PMC trace their attraction 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. 

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. 

We imagine a world where financial services are offered by a wide range of providers using commodity open source software utilizing the most modern approaches.  

Who is using fineract?

(For clarity, those using the mifos.org released solutions 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.  

What is the difference between Fineract and Fineract-CN? 

Fineract 1.x is a mature platform with open APIs, while Fineract CN is a cloud native, microservice architecture also supporting open banking APIs. 

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. 

Fineract1.x, prior to its donation to Apache was called mifosX, and by-design consists of a "headless" solution.  That is, fineract1.x is all about the APIs.  Front end applications can be developed separately and connected to fineract1.x  (For clarity, Mifos at https://github.com/openmf has a number of front ends to illustrate available functionality; these are not maintained by fineract, and devs on fineract will not respond to issues related to the front ends there.) 

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. 

Do I have to get the code to use the solution? 

If all you want is to use the solution, or to demo it, we recommend you use one of the available builds rather than setting up a development environment yourself.  The builds, found at http://fineract.apache.org/ (Downloads) are provided for convenience and should not be used in a production environment without fully working out details of operations (e.g. data backup) and security.  Also, Mifos volunteers continue to post builds for specific hosting solutions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mifos_X  (e.g. Azure and AWS).  

What is the process for getting the code and setting up a development environment? 

Please see Contributor's Zone, essentially you need to get your environment ready, then download from the github source and use one of the common IDEs.  

In general we ask that you take the time to read the instructions 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 know.  

How do I get up to speed on development tasks? 

Please see Contributor's Zone 

The Jira for the project is hosted (naturally) by Apache and is at https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/FINERACT/summary 

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). 

What is our Consensus approach?  

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.  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.