vidakovic commented on code in PR #5391: URL: https://github.com/apache/fineract/pull/5391#discussion_r2794059347
########## fineract-doc/modules/ROOT/pages/faq.adoc: ########## @@ -0,0 +1,94 @@ +== What is this project about? +At Apache Fineract, 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. + +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 which had developed the fully featured MifosX and released as open source in 2010 (which was generation 2 of the Mifos software). While many members of the PMC trace their 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. + +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, 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 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. + +== Is there a front end? Where are the reports? +Fineract just contains the back-end platform and APIs. Front end development is intentionally left out of the fineract1.x project to encourage the use of software integrators to develop their own front end solutions. Mifos has a number of open source front end User Interfaces (UIs) projects for reference that sit on top of fineract1.x including MifosX Community app (AngularJS project), reporting through Pentaho and there are also client and staff-facing mobile apps. Note that demo servers running Fineract will often be packaged with the open source front end of Mifos (see openmf.github.org) and that front end may not include all of the most recent features developed in fineract. Fineract-CN does have a web front end UI under development, intended as a demo. + +== 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. Review Comment: Doesn't exist anymore... Fineract CN was abandoned a couple of years ago. -- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: [email protected]
