Frinance

Have your friends hold you accountable to your personal finance goals in a fun and slightly addictive way!

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Inspiration

Personal finance has an ever more significant role to play in people's lives especially as pensions can no longer really be relied upon.

According to a 2016 Citibank report, the 20 most economically developed countries have a combined public pension deficit of US$78 trillion, 1.8 times their collective national debt. For the private pension industry in the US for example there is a US$3 trillion shortfall and in the UK the value is around £736.2 billion.

Traditional budgeting apps can provide some call to action but it is not substantial and easy to ignore. Instead we based our approach on the powerful psychological factor of accountability. There is plenty of literature to back this as being a far more effective method of reaching your goals than going at it alone.

What it does

You form a group with your friends, enter your long-term financial goals eg. to build a certain amount of savings per month or to save for a particular event in your life. Then you work out your monthly savings objectives and from here our webapp gamifies this for you.

You can set yourself challenges and your friends then respond with rewards and forfeits, or even join you in trying to achieve the challenge for themselves! The forfeits usually involve giving money to charity which removes the risk of people trying to cheat the system for personal gain to the detriment of others).

The webapp has the option to set these challenges as described above, you can then also view your and your friends' monthly performance to keep you motivated and hold each other accountable for your goals.

Moreover there is an integration with Telegram which sends you messages about these challenges, results, and most of all, it's extremely simple to use!(just @mention it in the Telegram chatroom)

How we built it

We used bootstrap and CSS templates to give the UI its professional look. For the personal analytics page visuals we used Chart.js. We wrote a small back-end for the Telegram chat bot in Go, implementing Telegram's bot API.

We decided to host the website with Heroku, so the latest version is always hosted on our home website.

Challenges we ran into

None of us were particularly experienced writing a front-end, so we had some trouble figuring out how to write the JS code on the pages, and how to make pages communicate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We know how important mobile devices are, and that more people carry a phone around all day than a laptop, and we're proud to say that the website automatically scales down with screen size and we can offer the same smooth experience on mobile.

As any app that tries to provide a social environment, we consider it an experience-wise necessary achievement to have a chat bot with a simple to use UI that communicates with the website, so that a friend group that wants to use our app can have a chatroom linked to their Frinance group.

What we learned

During the development process, we learned a bit more about front-end development, and JavaScript in particular. We also learned how to work with the Telegram bot API, and how to make inline queries (the small pop-up windows that appear above the text box when you're typing an @mention).

What's next for Frinance

  • The ability to create multiple groups, separate from one another
  • A back-end to communicate with the bank and automatically check whether the challenges were achieved
  • Security measures for joining groups: passwords, ability to kick unwanted people etc.
  • Wider range of available challenges

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