Inspiration
While reading about disruptive finance initiatives, micro finance isn't the usual thought for most people, however, we thought it also has some of the most untapped potential within the financial sector with plenty of room for innovation.
In a lot of places worldwide, people do not have local access to a bank so cannot get funding for any sort of ventures. This is where microfinancing fits in, an NGO takes the role of banks/governments to provide small, short term loans to encourage ventures and cover cashflow issues.
However, even within this industry, access to microfinancing and NGO’s is still limited or non existent in many areas, especially rural. This is where our platform fits in; it provides a platform for both people looking for finance and NGO’s providing them to access each other through the use of an app for the client looking for finance meaning they do not have to leave their home to travel to an NGO. This is beneficial for both sides here as it widens the potential pool significantly of who can access finance as well as streamlining and automating a lot of the service provided by the NGO’s by giving them a web platform to look at and accept/reject applications from. This combination of both platforms working in tandem gives a solution which would bring microfinance to significantly wider pool of people and digitising an NGO/government for very little cost and investment from their side.
What it does
Our platform has a client-sided app in which a potential applicant would sign up and fill out a preliminary application form. From here, on the website side, an NGO would look at the basic application details and decide whether or not to progress the application to the next stage where the candidate would be informed they have progressed to the next stage. This can all be monitored from the NGO's web page while the candidate would be able to monitor the application from the app.
In the end, if they're successful then various payment methods would be given depending on the particular NGO and location of the applicant.
How we built it
As of right now, the app has been built in Kotlin with our backend database being built with MongoDB and hosted on Google Cloud. This gives us a dynamic database that is stored independently of the application meaning it can be accessed elsewhere such as our webpage with no issues. We used Django to build the webpage backend for the NGO's to use for monitoring and modifying applications, it has good integration with MongoDB meaning an online database can easily be accessed for information.
Challenges we ran into
The challenges we faced included learning Django from scratch and building a functional, proof of concept website within the time given and integration with our API.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're particularly proud of the application as it is well built and developed, along with an API made for our database the backend is also pretty complete.
What we learned
We learned how to use MongoDB Atlas as well as Django to build a database and web application to implement and access it, this has been a good learning experience.
What's next for μFinance.Me
In the future, we would like to potentially add in the integration of smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain network to store contracts between NGO's and clients, this improves accountability and transparency as well as assisting in decentralising and making the system trustless to reduce inefficiency and corruption within the industry.
Also deeper integration into our django website to potentially include machine learning insights from Google Cloud on the DB. Deeper Twillio integration to allow texts to be used for notifications and potentially applications themselves for people without smartphones.
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