1. Bringing Banking to the Poor with the help of Angular JS
Mifos
Bringing Banking to the Poor with the help of Angular JS

2. Agenda Introduction to Financial Inclusion and Mifos
Our need for a SPA Framework
Why Angular?
Demo
What’s next?
How you can get Involved
Q&A
Inputs by Michael Vorburger, Edward Cable, Markus Geiss and Gaurav Saini (thanks!)

3. The need for Financial Inclusion
As of 2010, 2.4 billion people (~30% of world population) live on < $2/day
2.5 Billion People (> half the world’s adult population) do not have access to regular Financial Services
- Sourced from
The Microfinance Movement : A world in which as many poor and near-poor households as possible have permanent access to an appropriate range of high quality financial services, including not just credit but also savings, insurance, and fund transfers.

4. A Micro Finance operation in rural India
This image was taken during a Centre meeting conducted by Grameen Koota, one of the larger Mifos users serving more than half a million customers. A MFI employee would be responsible for disbursing loans and collecting repayments during these meetings

5. Loan Disbursements at a Centre Meeting
Many Organizations in Southern Asia follow the “Solidarity Groups” model pioneered by Mohammad Yunus (awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize 2006) – Picture Vorburger

6. Mifos Being used in Branch offices
Mifos serves as the Core Banking system for Organizations in the financial inclusion space - – Picture Vorburger

7. The Mifos Story
Used by more than 70 MFI’s serving more than 2.5 million customers
Managed by the Mifos Initiative (a non-profit registered in Washington)
Built with love by hundreds of volunteers spread across the world fighting poverty one line of code at a time
: Registered on Sourceforge
: Initial Mifos Product Launch
2009: Winner of JavaOne 2009 Duke’s choice award for Best Java Technology for the Open Source Community
2013: Launch of the new “MifosX” suite

8. Our Community
Picture taken during our 2013 Mifos Summit held at Jaipur India. Our next summit is scheduled to be during October in Kampala, Uganda.

9. The Original Mifos Product
Web based MIS for MFI’s built with Java (Spring MVC, Spring, Hibernate), MySQL and the Pentaho BI suite

10. Mifos X: The next generation of Mifos
Redesigned to fulfil our long-term vision of a fully extensible platform that can scale through multi-tenancy and rapidly be extended upon through a clean layered architecture and full API.
Platform: Encapsulates the complexity that exists in the business and technical domains needed for a Banking System behind a relatively simple API. This API frees up application developers to innovate and produce apps suitable for a variety of Financial inclusion services.
Built on a Jersey/Spring/JPA/MySQL stack
Applications: A suite of applications (mostly User Interfaces with no business Logic) built on top of "The Platform" that cater to a variety of financial Inclusion models

12. An App built by Musoni Systems
The Musoni system (built on top of the MifosX Platform) is optimized for Cashless operations and integrated with leading Mobile Money vendors in the African market

13. Android Client for the MifosX Platform

14. Our First Community App
Some of our goals while starting building out our first Community App towards the end of 2011
Cheap to Modify and extend
No Server Side language, no business logic within the app
Leverage on most common skills within our Community
Package (using Cordova) as a hybrid mobile app

15. Our first “Community App”
Built with JQuery and JQuery Templates

16. The need for a SPA Framework
As the community app matured, it became increasingly clear that the codebase would be difficult to maintain in the long run
DOM manipulation impeded parallel development by UI designers and JS developers
Large amount of Boiler plate code for common SPA tasks like two way data Binding, routing and tracking Browser history
Decision made to rewrite our SPA using a “Mature” framework which would address these issues out of the box

17. Why Angular?
Clean separation between the View and the Controller (Parallel development, Mobile Views)
Two way data Binding
Extending HTML vocabulary with “Directives”
“Server side” concepts like Dependency Injection, Modularization made sense to our (predominantly java) Community
Testability (both unit testing and E2E testing)
Basic Routing available out of the box. provides advanced routing
Could provide I18 support with help from libraries likehttp://angular- translate.github.io/ and

18. Why Angular continued…
Other factors that were taken into account
More awareness within our community when compared to competing frameworks
Decent documentation (now Excellent)
IDE support (Webstorm) and Chrome plugins like Batarang

19. Our Stack Bower: Package Management Grunt: Task runner
Require JS: JS Module Loader
Angular JS
Bootstrap: HTML and CSS Design Templates
D3: Data Visualization
Jasmine: Unit Testing Framework
Karma: Test runner

20. Community App Demo
Hosted on (login as mifos/password)

21. Benefits to our Community
Faster development cycles: Volunteer driven re-write of the Community app with AngularJS took < 3 months
Greatly increased contributions from Designers / HTML & CSS developers
Simplified collaboration process, increased volunteer satisfaction
Implementation partners have found it easier to extend/modify

22. Next Steps
Use Ionic (and Cordova) for a tablet optimized version of our Community app
E2E testing using Protractor
Offline Functionality (would be made easier with the planned enhancements in Angular 2)
* Details of upcoming changes in Angular 2 can be found at

23. Interested? Get Involved
Volunteer Opportunities:
Learn more about Contributing to Mifos :
Github Repo:
Subscribe to our Mailing Lists:
Developer List:
User List:

24. Question & Answers