Smart Bank

Inspiration

Banks focus heavily on protecting users from external threats like fraud and hacking, but we noticed that financial loss often happens through everyday overspending. Many budgeting apps track spending after it happens, but few actively prevent financial damage in real time. We were inspired to build a system that introduces intentional friction and accountability into everyday transactions

What it does

Our app lets users set and edit category-based budgets, track spending through a dashboard with remaining balance, financial health score, and category breakdowns, and record transactions with real-time validation. It blocks overspending (with essential overrides), stores transaction history, supports secure login, and plans to add smart budget alerts.

How we built it

We designed a full Figma UI/UX prototype and built the app with React Native. We implemented user authentication, budget creation and editing, transaction recording, category enforcement, and real-time budget validation logic.

Challenges we ran into

We faced challenges configuring the React Native app to sync properly with Expo Go, implementing secure authentication with duplicate and invalid logins, building accurate real-time budget blocking logic, managing dynamic state updates for spending and financial health, and restricting override functionality to essential categories only.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully built real-time transaction blocking based on budget limits, developed a fully functional authentication system, and transformed our Figma prototype into a working mobile application.

What we learned

As backend-focused developers, we gained hands-on experience in frontend and UI/UX design, improved our React Native state management and authentication flow skills, learned to design around user behavior, and strengthened our ability to debug mobile deployment issues with Expo.

What's next for Smart Bank

We plan to add parental monitoring for minors, smart predictive spending alerts, AI-driven financial recommendations, secure cloud storage with analytics, and direct bank API integration for real transaction syncing.