CorePay

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Main screen
Log in page
Otp page
Top up page
Stripe page
Transfer page
Personalised QR code for transfer
Reaching out to people who require cash

Problem Statement: `Reshaping Payments - Wallets`

✍️ Team Biography

🗿 Bernice Teo Year 3 Information Systems student. I am a woman in STEM.
👷‍♂ Au Yeong Wei Bin Year 3 Computer Science student. I look like a woman in STEM.
👨‍🎨 Darryl Poh Cheng Yew Year 2 Information Systems student. I support woman in STEM.
👨‍💻 Jowett Chng Kai Cheng Year 4 Information Systems student. I am a man in STEM.
👨‍🍳 Tan Yee Sen SMU Buffet Clearers chairman (Telegram link: https://t.me/+WA36he59qd4yYTVl)

🌟 Inspiration

Our aim is to empower underserved communities by addressing the challenges they face due to limited access to financial services. We aim to revolutionize financial services with CorePay, facilitating cash deposit and withdrawals without ATMs, standard e-wallet features, and multi-currency support, fostering financial inclusion and convenience for all. The following are the goals that our team focuses on:

🚀 Fostering Financial Inclusion At its core, CorePay is committed to fostering financial inclusion. We believe that everyone, regardless of their location or financial background, should have access to secure and convenient financial services. Our solution strives to bridge the gap between people and their finances, ensuring that financial empowerment is within reach for all.
📈 Empowering Underserved Communities CorePay's mission is to empower underserved communities by offering a reliable and user-friendly financial platform. Through innovative technology and a commitment to accessibility, we aim to improve the financial well-being of individuals and communities around the world.

💼 What it Does

CorePay is designed to simplify and enhance the way people manage their finances. Our solution addresses the common challenges faced by underserved communities due to limited access to financial infrastructure or services, and empowers individuals with a range of innovative features:

🌐 Cash Transactions Without ATMs CorePay enables users to perform cash transactions independent from traditional ATMs. Whether users need to withdraw or deposit cash, our platform offers a seamless and convenient alternative. Visit our media gallery or watch our video below to find out more!
💰 Standard E-Wallet Features In addition to cash transactions, CorePay provides essential e-wallet functionalities. Users can effortlessly top up their accounts and perform basic fund transfers to others, all within a user-friendly interface.
🌍 Multi-Currency Support To cater to a diverse user base, CorePay supports multi-currency transactions. Users can easily transfer funds of another currency with other wallet users, making cross-border transactions more accessible and cost-effective.

🔨 How We Built It

At CorePay, we leveraged a powerful stack of technologies to create a seamless and secure financial solution for our users:

Frontend Development

React JS: We chose React for our frontend development to build interactive and user-friendly interfaces.
Material-UI: Used for the standardisation of user interface components.
Firebase Hosting: Our frontend is hosted on Firebase, ensuring fast loading times and reliable accessibility for users.

Backend Development

Node JS: We used Node.js to power our backend, providing the foundation for server-side operations and data management.
Express JS: A robust and flexible web application framework for Node.js, played a pivotal role in building our API and handling HTTP requests.
Firebase Functions (Serverless): Firebase Functions allowed us to implement serverless architecture, ensuring scalability and cost-efficiency while handling backend processes.
Firebase Authentication (OAuth 2.0): To secure user data and authenticate users, we implemented Firebase Authentication, which utilizes OAuth 2.0 for seamless and secure user logins.

Payment Integration

Stripe API: We integrated the Stripe API into CorePay to facilitate secure payment transactions and ensure the safety of financial data.

Security considerations

Email OTP: An added layer of security when logging in that mitigates identity theft and unauthorised transactions, providing an ease of mind to the user.
Machine Learning for Anomaly Detection: Isolation forest, a machine learning algorithm, was used to detect anomaly transaction.

Scalability and availability considerations

Kubernetes: To ensure that our application is able to serve all our users in a timely manner, we intend to employ Kubernetes, a container orchestration service, which helps us to automatically scale our services according to the number of users we need to serve at any point of time. Additionally Kubernetes can also help with ensuring that our systems are fault tolerant, by having redundancy and data replication, in order for us to be able to recover well from failing services, all while maintaining the user's experience.

🚀 Challenges We Ran Into

💻 Security As a solution that deals with finance, security was of paramount importance. We brainstormed ways to implement robust security measures to protect user information and financial transactions, while maintaining a user-friendly experience.
💡 Product differentiation One of the most pressing challenges we encountered was the need for product differentiation. To stand out and provide real value to our users, we needed a unique and game-changing approach. Rather than attempting to replicate existing banking services, we decided to think beyond the conventional ATM-based model. This innovative thinking led us to a groundbreaking solution: cash transactions that are independent of ATMs.

Our innovative idea also addresses the problem statement's bonus goal on financial inclusion, as our solution helps underserved communities who have a lack of access to financial services and infrastructure.
📈 Scalability and Performance Anticipating potential rapid user growth, we had to design our platform to be scalable and performant. Optimizing resource usage and handling increased loads presented ongoing challenges. From day one of project execution, our team had already planned out future plans in terms of scalability and availability.

🏆 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

1. Revolutionizing Cash Transactions

We took on the challenge of addressing the scarcity of financial services in underserved communities and successfully developed a POC solution. Our solution enable users to withdraw and deposit cash without relying on traditional ATMs.

2. Financial Inclusivity and Empowering Underserved Communities

Our solution is committed to financial inclusivity, providing convenient and basic banking services to everyone, including the underserved communities.

3. Multi-Currency and Cross-Border Support

Our solution includes multi-currency support and cross-border transaction capabilities.

4. Full Stack and Deployed POC

Our POC is completed and deployed.

5. Robust Security Measures

Robust Security Measures are placed such as encryption, authentication, 2FA, with machine learning models that detect whether a transaction is suspicious or not.

🧠 What We Learned

We learned about integrating external services (e.g. Firebase, Stripe), deployment, robust security measures, and the usage of machine learning for anomaly detection. Some members also picked up new frameworks, especially for those who are not familiar with the solution's technology stack.

When we were ideating and addressing product differentiation, we also empathized and understand the pain point and needs of people in financially underserved regions.

🚀 What's Next for CorePay

Product wise, our future plans includes feature enhancements - such as integration with TikTok shop, financial education, and customer support using AI. On the business side, we would like to look into partnerships with businesses for incentives and doing more research to better understand the needs of our target audience.

Technology wise, our plan includes the adoption of Kubernetes and a cloud-native approach to further enhance scalability, reliability, and efficiency.