Pact AI — Consent-Aware Agentic Payments

Landing hero showcasing Consent-Aware Agentic Payments: AI drafts the plan, while humans retain complete control over the money.
Secure authentication gateway with Http Only cookie sessions, bcrypt hashing and rate-limiting for fintech-grade security.
Streamlined onboarding form allowing users to create an account and start managing collaborative financial pacts in seconds.
Live financial overview aggregating total budgets, planned spend, remaining funds, and category breakdown charts across pacts.
Pacts dashboard tracking active and archived group budgets, membership roles, and real-time funding progress indicators.
Central pact workspace to submit expenses, review versioned approvals, and manage member roles (Owner, Approver, Member).
Gemini converts plain text goals into structured budget line items with categories, amounts, priorities, and risk warnings.
9-stage transparent execution timeline tracking every event from initial natural language prompt to immutable ledger entry.
Interactive financial sandbox to simulate expense shifts and per-member splits with overrun alerts without mutating live data.
Recharts analytics suite featuring category pie charts, budget vs. planned comparisons, and one-click CSV audit export.
Tamper-proof audit ledger capturing immutable records of every proposal, approval, and verified PayPal transaction reference.
Conversational Copilot answering queries from authorized database records with deterministic safety rules (cannot move money).
User profile hub managing MongoDB-synced account data, default currencies, notification preferences, and PayPal test accounts.
Live health panel dynamically verifying active connectivity for MongoDB Atlas, Google Gemini API and PayPal Sandbox mode.
Smart Share fairly splits group expenses, supports custom contributions and tracks every member's payment status transparently.

Inspiration

Managing shared expenses for college trips, events and group purchases can be complicated. Budget changes, payment coordination and tracking approvals often require multiple apps and manual calculations. We were inspired to build Pact AI to simplify financial coordination through artificial intelligence while ensuring that users remain in control of their money.

What it does

Pact AI is an AI-powered financial coordination platform that transforms natural-language instructions into structured budgets and expense plans. Its key features include:

AI Plan Generator: Creates expense plans from user instructions.
Smart Budget Manager: Tracks expenses, payments and remaining budgets.
ConsentFlow: Allows authorized users to approve or reject expenses before payment.
PayPal Integration: Uses PayPal Sandbox to demonstrate checkout and payment capture.
What Changed?: Explains budget changes and generates revised plans.
Pact Ledger: Records approvals, transaction references and payment statuses.

How we built it

We use React.js and Tailwind CSS for the frontend, Node.js and Express.js for backend APIs, and MongoDB for storing financial plans, approvals and payment records. Google Gemini API powers AI-based planning and explanations. The PayPal Developer Platform and Sandbox Orders API enable test payments, while Postman supports API testing.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was connecting AI-generated plans to reliable financial operations. We addressed this by validating AI outputs, implementing backend budget rules, separating payment approval from AI recommendations and ensuring that payment statuses are based on backend verification rather than frontend assumptions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We designed a unified workflow that connects AI-powered planning, budget management, human approval, PayPal payments and transaction tracking. Our key innovation is consent-aware agentic payments, where AI coordinates financial tasks without having unrestricted authority over user's money.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate AI with payment APIs, validate structured AI outputs, manage financial state, and design approval workflows. We also learned the importance of secure payment processing, transparent transaction records and keeping users in control of financial decisions.

What's next for Pact AI — Consent-Aware Agentic Payments

We plan to introduce multi-member approval workflows, recurring expense management, intelligent budget recommendations, real-time payment notifications, improved audit trails and additional payment integrations. We also aim to explore configurable spending permissions and broader applications for student groups, families, freelancers and small businesses.

Our vision is to make financial coordination smarter and simpler: Delegate the Plan. Own the Payment.