• Created by Unknown User (myrle), last updated on Nov 21, 2016 3 minute read

I’m going to talk to you about about Apache Fineract!

First off let me introduce myself.

  • 17 years of programming experience in Java and C++, in which time I’ve worked across the full software stack, from UI to data import.

  • My focus has always come back to API design, and in the last three years, I’ve also added a focus on microservices architecture.

  • Solutions Architect at Mifos Initiative

  • I’m working primarily on the re architecting of Apache Fineract into REST microservices.  What we call Fineract 2.0 at the Mifos Initiative.

  • Specifically, I’m working on the core framework, the identity management microservice, the orchestration and provisioning microservice, and the product microservice.

Since what I’m working on hasn’t actually been taken into the Fineract community yet, it’s probably a little optimistic for me to call it Apache Fineract 2.0.  Which is why, when I’ve been talking to the Apache community about Fineract at this conference, I’ve put the focus on Apache Fineract 1.0, and the social mission of our project and our community.

So for those who haven’t heard the other presentations about Apache Fineract at this conference, let me explain the social mission we are trying to support.

In 1976 Muhammad Yunus, noticed that village women in the village of Jobra had to take out usurious loans to buy bamboo, which they were using to build furniture.  Traditional banks didn’t want to make the loans because of the high risk of default.  Traditional banks have a responsibility to their savings customers to be good stewards of their money, and so a certain risk-aversion is healthy for them.

Yunus lent $27 dollars to 42 women in the village.  The women made a small profit on the loan and repaid Mr. Yunus.  Thus providing the first evidence that poor people are not as high risk as previously thought when banking services are offered to them properly.

Microfinance was born.

Microfinance  lifts poor people out of poverty and it costs very little.  It can even be profitable.

  • 55% of Grameen customers who remained customers for 5 years or more exit poverty.

  • The average credit write-off rate is 1%.  The average overdue rate is between 3 and 6%.

These are some of the reasons why Muhammad Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work.

So how did this get to be a software project?

Big banks use expensive closed-source systems and amortize their costs over millions of relatively wealthy customers.  That approach is not available to typical micro-finance institutions (also known as MFIs). They just don’t have the funds available.  Any infrastructure costs they have must to be payed in the form of interest and fees by their clients.

Open-source developers have seen this class of problems many times before.

In 2004 the software project Mifos was born which would eventually evolve into the project Fineract which was accepted into the incubator at the end of last year.

Since we’ve joined, we’ve done several things:

  • We’ve renamed the project and moved it into the Apache infrastructure

  • We’ve removed dependencies to Pentaho and Hibernate because of their Apache incompatible licenses.

  • We’ve moved communications onto the Apache mailing lists and other Apache infrastructure (Jira and Confluence).

  • We’ve started moving documentation from Mifos Infrastructure.

  • We’ve made our first Incubator-vetted release.

We still have some more work to do:

  • We need to get into a release rhythm.

  • We need to overcome the communications-challenges that separate lists for the UI (Mifos) and the backend (Fineract) are causing us.

  • We need to meet our own internal goal of also creating binary releases.

  • We need to grow the community.  Currently most code contributions are from Conflux employees, with a few contributions and some community organizing being done by Mifos employees.

  • Mifos employees need to introduce our re-architecture to the community.

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