Acceptance and Project Idea

Hi all,

April 2016, 8:00 PM (GMT + 1). No lights. I know the list is out but I can’t check because for some reason there are no lights, my computer is down and so is my phone.

I am tensed and ……. 🙂 but I keep praying I have been given the opportunity.

……………………….. here I am guess I was accepted. How happy I was when I received the news. This is going to be a new experience for me.

Project Idea

Project title: Mobile Money Integration in West and Central Africa

Mentors: Antony Omeri, Ayuk Etta.

Student: Daniel Carlson

Project Abstract

This project involves integrating mobile money services into the Mifos platform which
will make this platform more accessible to clients especially those in West and Central
Africa. With mobile money integrated into the core banking system of financial
institutions, services such as money transfer, real time account information and many
more become possible.
By the end of the Google summer of code session(3 months), I intend to have mobile
money integrated into the Mifos platform using leading mobile money platforms such as
MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money for west and Central Africa.

I won’t repeat my proposal here. That will be uploaded to google docs and the link provided at a later post.

On this blog, I will simply document work being carried out, difficulties and solutions and many more concerning work on the project.

Implementation

Meeting with mentors – Tuesday April 26th, 5:45 PM (GMT + 1)

Means: Skype Call

Points from this discussion involved:

• Mobile money engine will be built as a standalone application. This is to allow others in other locations other than West and Central Africa to plug in their respective APIs and use the engine. So in effect this will be a generic solution
• On the Mifos X community app, we have payment types, on this engine we will have payment channel which will be of three types: 1) Mobile money(main) – MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money 2) Bank Channel – Any bank  3) Email – Paypal or Scrill(this is to make the app more attractive)
• For the mobile money, since this is a generic application, we will pick one telecom network and implement engine with it. But if time permits, both MTN and Orange will be used.
• Packaging should be done in such a way it is automated. That is application should be easily deployed.

2 methods of implementation were discussed:

1. Implementing the engine as a bridge. Here, hooks will be used which will provide an action and trigger mechanism which will trigger a transaction.
2. Implement engine as a service which simply runs in the back and gets data from the Mifos X API and carries out the needed transactions.

Questions to ask

For the second method what if the service never happens………

Technologies mentioned: Spring, microservices, hooks.

Examples: Twilio SMS, retrofit

Tasks:

• A repository will have to be setup for the project
• Do research and come up with which method of implementation I will use
• Study webhooks and microservices

Feel free to share whatever ideas you have on this project.

Cheers!

Daniel Carlson.