PayTouch

Inspiration

With a goal to revolutionize the financial industry, we first noted that Venmo is a widely used platform for money transfer. However, Venmo still requires a local user account and is still quite a hassle to exchange user information before getting accessibility to the actual features of the app. In order to improve convenience for the process of transfer payments while still maintaining security of personal information, we present PayTouch, a NFC implementation for payment transfer across phones with fingerprint authentication and secure encryption.

What it does

PayTouch offers an elegant user interface that displays current bank account balance and has a blank prompting for amount to transfer. Once the input is read, simply placing the phone next to the receiver phone will initiate the NFC process for a handshake between the two devices. This transitions to a verification screen where the transferer goes through fingerprint authentication. The personal data is encrypted through a hybrid method of RSA and AES to a server and should the details match, the payment transfer is complete and the balance on the main screen along with the history tab should update with the respective changes.

How we built it

PayTouch is developed on Android Studio for user interface and uses Android Beam to facilitate the NFC transaction. A server making use of RSA and AES encryption verifies personal data.

Challenges we ran into

First, trying to develop on Android posed a challenge because conducting NFC required two Android phones and we had to ask around for another one to test our implementations. Another challenge was getting NFC handshake to synchronize with the phone correctly. Finally, an overall challenge was the time constraint.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The entire project was a highly valuable learning experience because without prior knowledge in NFC and Android development, we started from scratch and took time to understand the concepts behind NFC. We are proud of how all members were able to understand the underlying foundations for implementing NFC while still dividing up tasks to complete each component of the app.

What we learned

We learned how NFC works across mobile devices, Android Studio for development, Android Beam API, and how to create a server that can read and write data securely through a hybrid process of both RSA and AES encryption.

What's next for PayTouch

Our vision is a cross platform integration between Android and iOS. We tried to implement this in the beginning but realized that goes across platforms requires a special bit encoding and as mentioned in the challenge of time constraints, we were not able to provide this feature for PayTouch as of just now.