FastFi

by Stephen Sulimani & Eric Nguyen

Inspiration

After moving to Metro Atlanta to finish high school nearly five years ago from New York City, I quickly realized the lack of financial education in the Georgia high school curriculum. I realized that many of my friends in high school, and even today in college, know very little about how to manage their personal finances. Of course, with student debt ballooning into the unbelievable number we see today, it's important that our generations and our posterity are able to manage their finances without having to pay for an expensive financial planner. Stephen Sulimani

What it does

FastFi exemplifies what online banking could be. While there are many solutions that exist out there to allow the everyday person to invest and budget, we believe its time to show the true opportunity cost of excessive spending. For college students, our biggest unnecessary expense tends to be eating out and paying for meals instead of cooking at home. In our demo, FastFi calculates the user's spending on food over a two week span, and suggests reducing some of that spending and instead investing it in numerous different securities and financial instruments. We believe having a feature like this on every online banking website will encourage people to spend less and invest more, securing a better financial future in the process.

How we built it

After the two of us met, we knew right away that we wanted to use the MERN stack. That of course being, MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js. We used MongoDB as our database to store our users after they use Auth0 by Okta to sign in. Express.js is the main driver behind our backend API, and it is critical to connecting our frontend webapp to our database, along with APIs provided by Capital One and Alpha Vantage.

Challenges we ran into

While we've both used React numerous times in the past, we are by no means experts. There were multiple instances where we were stuck for hours at a time, however time and time again we persevered and conquered each challenge that came our way. Whether it was random issues rendering our frontend, or issues connecting to our backend, we put our heads down and worked until we found a solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very happy to have used the MERN stack. It is an increasingly popular tech stack and we were able to learn a multitude of new information from trying a stack neither of us are experts at. We're extremely proud to have been able to go from a basic idea to a polished demo that shows our idea and our thinking in just 48 hours.

What we learned

As previously mentioned, we both learned an incredible amount about the MERN stack. Eric was responsible for most of the frontend development, and Stephen was responsible for most of the backend development. We were lucky to have naturally drifted to these team positions, and we learned quite a bit from each other. In addition to learning more about the tech stack we chose, we were also able to learn Docker, which we used to containerize and deploy our webapp. We quickly learned what a powerful tool Docker really is, and we will surely use it more in the future.

What's next for FastFi

As we're submitting this project for the Capital One challenge, we would hope that this could inspire change in the online banking world and bring in a whole new world of financial literacy and education for the masses. We believe projects like this will truly revolutionize banking.

Built With

• alphavantage
• docker
• express.js
• javascript
• mongodb
• n
• nessie
• node.js
• react