Credit First

Inspiration

6 million people in the US do not use banks and an additional 18 million are underbanked, meaning they do not rely on bank-based transactions (FDIC 2021). In this day and age, nearly every significant financial commitment requires good credit; unfortunately, many people do not have access to resources that promote financial literacy, so navigating the process can be extremely difficult.

Even as students, we've struggled to find easy-to-understand financial knowledge. To address this issue, we created Credit First: a web application that matches the user to a credit card suited for their needs, with a focus on a user's financial goals.

What it does

Credit First collects information on a user's financial information through a questionnaire which it uses in combination with a collection of credit card information to perform personalized recommendations for a credit card. Our project also gives specific financial tips tailored to each user's profile.

How we built it

We used web scraping to collect our information about major credit cards with a focus on credit cards that were beginner friendly and more easily accessible. To build the website we used React and we created a form to gather user information. We then created an algorithm that utilizes user data to predict credit scores, calculates whether the cash back to annual fee would be a net positive, and recommends the best credit card for each user. We also integrated openAI's API to suggest financial literacy advice.

Challenges we ran into

Implementing the search algorithm involved understanding many different variables and financial concepts in order to optimize for a user's best credit card overall. It was challenging to handle various relationships and cases and it required lots of debugging to ensure it ran correctly. We also faced difficulties getting openAI's API to work with our website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating an accurate algorithm that analyzes many inputs and compares them to different metrics.

What we learned

How to use AI to support and provide features to our project.

What's next for Credit First

We want to work on gamifying the process of building financial literacy and rewarding users who reach milestones towards their financial goals. This would help the application become more engaging and will be useful as we want to translate it into mobile applications in the future. We also want to add a chat bot to increase the interactivity of our application.