ChequeMate

ChequeMate ♟️ turns banking data into financial resilience scores, interactive shock simulations, and gamified AI-powered guidance. Because life's next move shouldn't checkmate your finances!

Comment

Inspiration

What if your next paycheque never came? How long would you actually survive financially?

That's the question that inspired ChequeMate, our chess-themed Financial Resilience Engine!

While exploring banking data, we discovered something surprising: earning more doesn't necessarily mean being more financially secure. Some accounts with significantly higher monthly inflows had much shorter financial runways than accounts receiving far less.

We wanted to turn these hidden financial patterns into something people could actually understand, explore, and learn from. Because when life makes an unexpected move, your finances shouldn't have to face checkmate!

What it does

ChequeMate helps people understand their financial resilience before life throws an unexpected challenge their way.

Users can explore financial profiles, view their Financial Resilience Score, and enter our Shock Lab to simulate situations like job loss, increased bills, unexpected expenses, or multiple financial shocks happening together.

Our Safety Net Planner helps users explore how additional savings or reduced spending could improve their financial runway.

But we didn't want to make just another financial dashboard! We introduced Mate, our interactive 3D AI chess coach, along with personalized quests, XP, badges, and Runway Run, a financial survival mini-game.

The goal? Make financial education useful, understandable, and actually fun!

How we built it

We worked with an anonymized banking dataset containing over 1 million transactions, 4,500 accounts, and 185,000 monthly financial records.

Our technology stack included:

  • Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery: Built a Bronze, Silver, and Gold data pipeline to process and validate financial data.
  • TigerData (PostgreSQL): Analyzed financial trends, discovered hidden financial vulnerabilities, and connected validated account data to our backend.
  • Python and FastAPI: Developed our financial shock simulator, resilience scoring system, and backend APIs.
  • HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Chart.js, and Three.js: Created interactive dashboards, visualizations, and our 3D chess-themed experience.
  • Google Gemini: Integrated AI-assisted financial explanations through Mate.
  • Entire: Used Sessions, Graph, and Brain to track AI-assisted development, understand code relationships, and preserve important project context.

One of our core calculations determines how long an account's financial buffer can survive a monthly shortfall:

$$ \text{Financial Runway} = \min\left(120,\frac{\text{Remaining Financial Buffer}}{\text{Monthly Shortfall}}\right) $$

This applies when both the remaining buffer and monthly shortfall are positive. We handle zero-buffer and no-shortfall situations separately.

We also built automated tests to validate our financial calculations and backend functionality, because even a hackathon prototype needs accurate numbers!

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was turning a massive amount of financial data into insights that were accurate, meaningful, and easy to understand.

We had to clean and validate datasets, investigate unexpected financial patterns, make sure our calculations stayed consistent across different components, and connect everything into one working application.

Integrating data engineering, backend development, frontend features, and AI within just 24 hours was definitely an adventure!

And of course, fixing one bug only to discover three more became a team activity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built an interactive financial resilience platform using data from over 1 million transactions.
  • Discovered the Cashflow Paradox, showing that higher inflows don't always translate into longer financial survival.
  • Identified the Timing Trap: 588 account-months experienced negative balances despite having nonnegative monthly cashflow.
  • Found that 156 additional accounts fell below six months of simulated runway when increased household bills were combined with an income shock.
  • Developed customizable financial shock simulations, resilience scoring, historical insights, and a Safety Net Planner.
  • Created Mate, our interactive 3D AI chess coach, and made financial learning more engaging through quests, rewards, and mini-games.
  • Implemented automated backend tests to verify calculations and improve reliability.

What we learned

This datathon taught us that the most interesting discoveries aren't always the most obvious ones!

We gained hands-on experience with data engineering, advanced SQL, financial modelling, API development, AI integration, automated testing, and collaborating under pressure.

We also learned how important it is to recognize the limitations of data. Just because we can identify a pattern doesn't mean we can automatically explain what caused it.

Most importantly, finding interesting insights is only half the challenge. Turning those insights into something useful, understandable, and engaging is what really makes a difference.

What's next for ChequeMate

We're excited to keep improving ChequeMate with more personalized financial insights, deeper historical analysis, expanded gamification, and an even better user experience.

In the future, we'd love to explore secure integration with real financial data, allowing users to understand and improve their own financial resilience.

*Because life will always make unexpected moves. The goal is to make sure your finances don't get checkmated! *

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history