Aiding-Peace

How do we support as many charities as possible, make it easy for large companies to donate whilst fighting corruption to ensure people are helped with those donations? The answer is Aiding-Peace!

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Inspiration

We're all in this together, every person has a part to play in making sure the world is a better place for everyone. It's not always easy and sometimes people put their interests before what is good for other people.

We wanted to come up with a way to fix that so charities could carry on helping people, companies could sponsor that work and together we can make the world a better place to live!

We know why we care about this, but why should companies care? Well the ESG Global Survey 2021 from BNP Paribas tells us that 61% of investors engage with companies as part of their ESG strategy. They also tell us that a larger share of investors are moving their portfolio into ESG and 22% of investors say all or most of their portfolio incorporates ESG. So its clear, if companies want to keep getting bigger and more profitable, they need to stand up and do their bit to help the rest of us.

To help companies do this, we created Aiding-Peace, the ESG Strategy as a Service solution.

What it does

Aiding peace makes it simple for companies to work with charities to make the world a better place. Companies want to create an ESG strategy, but they struggle to find charities and countries where they can make the most impact, avoid the risk of corruption and improve their brand equity.

To address this Aiding-Peace works by connecting companies with charities independent of any potential corruption making sure that the donations from the companies go straight into the hands of the people who need them.

So how do we do it?

  • We start by using Finastra's FusionPay API's to take the payments in whatever currency the company supports. Where necessary we can handle the exchange rate too at the time the payment happens.
  • We use Finastra's Banking as a Service API's to handle the money transfer between the charity and wherever they're going to spend that money. This means that donations towards specific things like water can happen without the charity having to worry about looking after that money before spending it.
  • We will also use Finastra's OpenBanking APIs to make sure that the money the charity received was spent on the items the company expects.
  • Once these donations have been checked and proven correct then the charity will receive points / badges showing their dedication to being ethical on our system.
  • The company that made the donation will also receive points / badges showing how much they donated and to which cause.
  • Companies can then compare themselves using our leader board to see how they compare to their competition.

It doesn't end there though! Charities that take donations through us will be able to use the data from those transactions along with Finastra's OpenBanking system to apply for loans to help their charities grow and help more people.

Is this viable?

Yes! We call this our ESG as a Service model, where companies will pay us in order to give them the opportunity to donate in this way. The way the business will work is:

  • Companies will pay us a monthly fee to use our platform. In return they gain brand equity for all the help they're doing in the world.
  • Every time a payment is made we receive a small transaction fee for every donation. This helps to pay for Finastra's API's as well as our own stuff that is handling the payment.
  • Banks will want to invest in this system as it gives them a better look at how much money the charity makes and spends before offering them a loan. Reducing risk but giving them better access to more customers.
  • Charities will want to use this because it helps them get donations from large companies that want to do good, it makes running their charity simpler because they don't have all the financial implications to worry about thanks to Banking as a Service and they can also use their performance to apply for loans.

How we built it

We started building this by talking to our mentor about Finastra's ESGa team and what it meant. After that we realised that we were really excited about the chance to do good in the world so we started coming up with ideas on how this could work to help people and our mentor showed us how we could still help those people in exactly the same way and also make a profit so we could continue to help people.

Once we had the business plan in place we needed to make something. We did some drawings of what we wanted the screens to look like and our mentor showed us how he could use code to make those screens happen. We built a real mobile app using Ionic, Angular and Python to show our idea to you all.

Challenges we ran into

It wasn't easy to get to where we are today. We had to learn a lot about finance, green loans and also about how businesses worked and were able to donate money. A real challenge for us was figuring out how we wanted to help so many people. We had loads of ideas but couldn't all agree on a single one. Then we decided, what if we helped other people make their ideas happen, and Aiding-Peace was born! Understanding how we could make our app work using FusionFabric.cloud and Finastra API's was also difficult, but our mentor gave us some demonstrations of how it could work and helped us through it so when we decided on how it needed to work we could come up with a plan.

We were hoping to build a much more complex app with lots of extra screens and maybe even a connection to a real API, but we didn't have enough time to get that far, but we hope we get the chance to bring our idea forward and make those parts of it next.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Our idea and how we worked together to make it happen.
  • We’re proud that we got to work together as a team to represent our school.
  • We’re very proud of our idea and the designs we made to show our mentor for the app. ## What we learned
  • Teamwork and how to share ideas and agree on what to do with all of our ideas
  • We learned about community. Not just our community but how to be a good global citizen and how we can work together to help improve the lives of others.
  • We learned a bit about code, we saw some HTML, JavaScript, CSS and learned about how Apps and Websites are made.
  • We learned a lot about Finance. We were taught about green loans and how banks and other lenders are trying to help make it easier to borrow money to do good things.
  • We learned about how money works and the difference between paper money and digital money. ## What's next for Aiding-Peace We really love our idea, but it can’t stand on it’s own. To build the ecosystem we will need:
  • Client Companies / Partners to take part with donations
  • Charities & Causes to sign up to receive those donations
  • Banks to use Finastra API’s and our app to handle the money.

Once that is done we will need to Advertise to raise awareness.

Finally we will need to plug our app into Finastra API’s from these products to handle the money:

  • Trust Machine / FusionTrust
  • Baas / Banking as a Service
  • FusionPay
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