BaaSFlow is pleased to have been the leading contributor over the past two years to the Apache Fineract® project. One measure is we contributed over 60% of the over 400,000 lines of code changes.
Release 1.9.0 of Apache Fineract® represents a major improvement in a number of areas and fixes some 165 issues. Check out the Youtube introduction to the release.
Our vision for this stage of the project is to align with the need for product innovation and performance. Working with our customers we’ve enabled a highly performant cloud configuration and some of that work is reflected in the necessary changes to the underlying technologies used. We highlighted many of our changes in the most recent Apache Community Over Code conference in October 2023.
In tandem with the changes to Fineract, we also contributed to the Mifos Admin user interface, aimed at the back-office user in a bank branch or head office.
As mentioned at the Halifax conference the team completely re-worked a lot of underlying code to enable Business Dates separation from system date. Frankly this was long overdue and code debt that needed to be paid down. If your banking operations are in more than one time zone, or are in the cloud, or have continuous round the clock operations, this is an essential change.
We also were driven by the need to enhance a more “pluggable” architecture and are pleased to see the new Custom Code module concept starting to take shape. With this concept, we hope to see innovators building components on top of Fineract rather than forking the code. Forking the code means we don’t get the benefit of the maxim in open source: “We get what we contribute, we get what you contributed, we get what everyonehas contributed”.
We pushed a number of key features including user defined delinquency buckets, transaction types to include goodwill and chargebacks, multi disbursement logic improvements, down payments, and many more.
I’ll cover our implementation of moving loans off balance sheet in another post. You’ll see it as “Sell Loan” in the Mifos interface but it goes well beyond that. I wrote a short paper on Securitization in Microlending in 2005 and its finally found its way into our thinking.
Supported by our new use of SpringBatch and using Kafka, we implemented advanced close of business jobs and enabled streaming of such data to downstream applications. With this optional set of functionality, we enable Fineract to be used in a more enterprise setup. i.e. Fineract may be only one of several systems in a setup.
Still in the backend, while we started the migration to Postgres in release 1.8 with the adoption of Liquibase, in Release 1.9, Postgres features prominently and we’re pleased to have be able to contribute all of this to the project. We’ve also added read and write modality to the instance concept, building an analogy to the CQRS but at a Kubernetes node level.
Fineract is fundamentally a Java application, written in a language that continues to dominate financial services. In 2003, when deciding on technologies, we opted for POJO (plain old java objects) and have more or less tried to stay with that concept. Fineract is a SpringBoot application.
BaaSFlow is a commercial open source company, implementing Fineract in the cloud alongside additional components and integrating into payment and identity systems. We offer a SAAS Solution for banking and credit unions. Please contact us for more informatio
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