Announcing Fineract as a Service, an On-Demand Financial Core
And it’s free to use for development purposes!
TLDR: We’ve developed a tool that automatically deploys a financial core and back-office system for any financial organization. The core takes care of accounting, portfolio management, and CRM functionality for any financial institution. It allows you to onboard customers and to manage loans, deposits, and current accounts for both individuals and corporations. Try It!
Why?
Last year, we started a project for a client that demanded a financial core. From past endeavors, I’ve known about Fineract— An open-source, financial core that had everything we could ever want. We’ve begun working with it and quickly saw the power of having a full REST API for any financial action that we needed.
- Need to process a customer’s information in order to comply with a KYC directive? — you’ve got it.
- Need an accounting module with a full accounting tree that links to any financial activity? No problem. got it.
- Need powerful reports? You’ve got it!
- Loans, Deposits, and Checking Accounts? Done, Done, And Done!
Should I Care?
Well, if you’re part of the fintech industry, you already know that financial services cannot continue to exist as they are. You’ve got to offer more flexible, transparent, and available services to your customers, as they expect nothing less than that.
Having a powerful financial core available using a simple REST API, allows you to plan for the next big thing! It allows automation of manual processes, integration of external services easily, and could also support various solutions such as e-wallets, smart payment platforms, an exchange platform, and much much more!
By also including a simple back-office application — Mifos X Community App, you could start to offer credit today! (provided you are licensed to do so in your country)
Fine, Show It To Me!
Our main goal with this service was to allow an easy, no-strings-attached, deployment of your next financial core, and to allow you to experiment however you’d like.
By going to https://faas.articode.co/ you will get just that. In 3 easy steps, you will be GTG!
- Enter the name of your next financial solution
- Upload your logo
- Enter a bit of personal information (For the sake of analytics)
And presto! You receive an email telling you that your instance is ready to use, batteries included, and everything.
Now, we should maybe try it out?
Testing My Brand Spanking New Financial Core
So the first thing you can do is to go play with Mifos X, the back-office app. In the email, you’ve received a link to your back-office — pre-configured with your instance. Enter the username and password you’ve received, and log in.
Now, let’s create your first loan product. For the sake of this example, we will create a simple financing solution for a bulk order of peanuts. Such a solution requires a loan that will be given to the customer at the point of sale and will allow the seller to receive his asked price while allowing the customer to pay small monthly payments. Think of most e-commerce sites lately and their financing option (Affirm, AfterPay, etc...).
Go to the Admin menu -> Products -> Loan Products -> Create Loan Product.
Now you will be taken through a six-step wizard which will allow you to set up the different terms of the product, various technical settings, charges, and also will allow you to configure accounting ledgers for the product.
Again, for the simplicity of this post, we will focus on what makes this product a peanut financing solution.
In the terms step I’ve set the following terms:
- Principal (How much of the cost, we are willing to cover) — Min: $100, Max: $10,000.
- Number of repayments — Min: 2, Max: 36
- Repay every: 1 month
- Interest Rate (Our profit for in this financing solution) — Min: 0.1%, Max: 10% for the whole term. This creates borders for our solution and the actual interest rate should be derived from the credit score and term of the financing.
I’ve left the rest of the settings as they are meant to be used in more complex solutions.
Now, if a customer enters our office tomorrow and wants to buy 10 tons of peanuts, we could (technically) offer a financing solution.
To create a new client press on the Clients menu -> Clients -> Create Client.
And after entering the basic info of our customer, we create a new loan for them:
We set the amount, requested installments, the interest rate, and just like that the system has already created a repayment info table for our customer.
After that, all that remains is the approval of the said loan and that’s it, you’ve got yourself a working financial solution that fits well into your business and we’ve already served one of your customers! 🚀
Summary
The financial services world is quickly changing thanks to the large number of new startups diving headfirst into this space.
Although that is the case, a lot of those startups are focusing on giving the customer, the best possible user experience, as they should. While the core of every one of those financial solutions is pretty much the same, it does take a significant amount of effort to create a unique and seamless financial solution that is tailored to the customer needs.
By using the tools I’ve shown in this post, you can focus on what matters most, and leave the already-solved problems to Fineract and Mifos X, Open Source financial core and back-office app that is already being used by over 500 institutions around the world.
Who We Are?
Articode is a software development company that specializes in building financial solutions for Fintech companies. We use (and contribute to) various open-source projects such as Fineract in order to quickly build and deploy slick and customer-centric mobile and web applications.
Head over to articode.co for more information and contact info.
