Forest Hill, MD, April 24, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Fineract™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.
The first Apache project developed from within the financial services technology sector (known as "FinTech"), Apache Fineract is an Open Source system for core banking as a platform. 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.
"Core banking software is one of the oldest applications of digital electronic computing. Apache Fineract's graduation as a Top-Level Project is an important next step for Open Source into applications that affect us all," said Myrle Krantz, Vice President of Apache Fineract.
Fineract was created at the Mifos (Micro Finance Open Source) Initiative (a spin-off of the Grameen Foundation, launched by Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the father of microfinance), which began to develop software in 2004 to meet the demands of microfinance institutions (MFIs). In December 2015, the Mifos Initiative submitted Fineract to the Apache Incubator.
"In many ways Fineract broke new grounds as an Incubating project at the ASF," said Roman Shaposhnik, Apache Fineract Incubator Mentor, Director of Open Source Strategy at Pivotal and Vice President Technology for ODPi at Linux Foundation. It was the first project that was originally developed by a non-profit: Mifos Initiative. It was the first project with an extremely important social agenda in mind: speed up the elimination of poverty. It was the first project that fully embraced the next generation microservices architecture. But there's one thing that gets me even more excited: how quickly the Fineract community embraced 'The Apache Way' of project governance. They truly made my job as a mentor smooth sailing and I wish them to grow by leaps and bounds now that they are a TLP at the ASF."
Apache Fineract can be deployed in any environment, whether Cloud or on-premise, on- or offline, on mobile or PC. Fineract is extensible enough to support any organizational type or delivery channel, and flexible enough to support any product, service, or methodology. For any organization, large or small, Apache Fineract will provide the client data management, loan and savings portfolio management, integrated real time accounting, and social and financial reporting needed to bring digital financial services in a modern connected world.
"As the steward of the Open Source Mifos community since its inception at the Grameen Foundation in 2006, I'm excited for the next phase of growth and development for our ecosystem as it becomes a part of the Apache community," said Edward Cable, President/CEO, Mifos Initiative. "Organizations like Musoni Services and Conflux Technologies have blazed a trail in showing others how to build sustainable and impactful financial inclusion solutions on top of the Apache Fineract platform. I look forward to cultivating and catalyzing new innovations for financial inclusion amongst the developers across The Apache Software Foundation."
An array of organizations use Apache Fineract for rapid product development, support for multiple lending methodologies, full range of deposit products, and flexible calculation of interest, penalties, and fees.
"In my role as CTO of Musoni I have been working in the Fineract community since the very early days, and have seen the community and platform grow to the mature state it is in today," said Sander van der Heyden, CTO, Musoni. "We are using Fineract as one of the core components for our cloud-based core-banking platform, which is currently in use by over 90 MFI's across Africa. Together with the community our team has collaborated on a large number of the features that are in the platform today. We would not have been able to deliver these without the advantages of working together with others in the community, sharing experience, market knowledge and development capacity. The Fineract community is in a truly unique position to have access to hands-on knowledge of financial markets and products across almost all developing markets worldwide and to combine these into the platform. Now that the project is graduating we are hoping to see even more activity and growth in the community, especially looking forward to new versions more suitable for modern cloud based architectures, which are already in development."
"We are the innovation lab for Gentera in which we are devoted to create new business models for the base of the pyramid, through internal entrepreneurs working in specific projects and supporting and collaborating with startups focusing on this market. We have used Fineract because it allowed us to generate loans through its API in a very flexible way, which enables us to offer a completely digitized offer for our group loans clients," said Eduardo Lincona, Platforms Subdirector at Fiinlab. "It has contributed to our success because on our current core banking we were not able to create loans through an interface, therefore it was impossible for us to offer a 100% digitized experience for them. This functionality allowed us to test whether it is feasible to offer a digital loan to our customers. The community is very wide and has many on line materials, in addition Aleks, who has been our consultant, has done a tremendous work allowing us to react very quickly to the demands of our customers."
"Apache Fineract's breadth of functionality and ease of extensibility has enabled us to leverage the same for building 'Finflux', a next generation core-banking system serving multiple sectors of the financial services industry including digital banks, fin-tech lenders, microfinance institutions, co-operatives, credit unions, self-help groups and business correspondents," said Vishwas Babu, CTO of Conflux Technologies. "Engineers at Conflux have been deeply involved with Apache Fineract since its inception, and we look forward to continue contributing our mite towards the project's success."
"For many years, technology had been a barrier to our rapid expansion plans," said Samit Shetty, Director of Chaitanya India Fin Credit Pvt. Ltd. "With the help of Conflux Technologies and their solutions which are powered by Apache Fineract, technology is now our primary business accelerator."
"With the help of Conflux Technologies, we moved from a manual system to a core banking solution powered by Apache Fineract to consolidate varied groups to follow our standardized procedures and reduce reporting delays and efforts by 40%," said Ruhiu (Gathogo) John, ICT Officer at Caritas Nairobi.
"To fully participate in the digital world, all people need access to banking services and electronic money," said Paul Maritz, an industry executive and investor, and a long-time supporter of Mifos.org and Fineract. "Open Source is playing an increasingly important role in today’s software world, and Fineract is an important foundation to enable access by all to the digital world."
"The Apache Fineract community is proud to provide code which helps institutions extend banking services to the poorest of the poor, thus helping them to lift themselves out of poverty," added Krantz. "We welcome contributors who want to support the Fineract technology, from the Fineract code itself, to documentation, and best practices information."
Availability and Oversight Apache Fineract software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Fineract, visit http://fineract.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheFineract
About the Apache Incubator The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 620 individual Members and 6,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Confluent, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, ODPi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF
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