OpenLend

Inspiration

After taking a look at the prompt, A Journal of Memories, our team was intrigued by the possibilities of creating opportunities as new opportunities are the building blocks of new memories. We believe that financial technology paves the way for social mobility. In an attempt to achieve this goal, our team embarked on a journey to create a lending platform to provide access to capital in a novel way.

We have introduced a platform that inverts the current dynamic of lending - giving more power to the people who need it.

Challenges

We had many questions while designing this app. How could we design the backend, determine risk for transactions, and implement an auction system?

These challenges were mainly resolved. We designed the backend in Django with “Loan Requests” as our main model, determined risk through a random forest model deployed on Google Cloud Platform with Vertex AI, and created a high performant auction system with WebSockets in Go.

Improvements

Although we have made great strides in creating an innovative financial platform for the future, there are some areas in which time would greatly benefit the project. The first area in which the project could be improved would be improving the accessibility of the project for our users. At first, we had wanted to create a developer platform to improve accessibility. However, we pivoted to give users more access to our platform to create a solution for people.