Pipeline

Inspiration

We wanted a tool to help simply our income management in an age where automation is no longer just a luxury.

What it does

By acting as a shim between your employer and your own financial institutions it allows users to create a portable financial infrastructure that is agnostic of any one employer, and provides freedom to manage their own finances with little to no risk. By linking your own financial institutions (retirement accounts, brokerage account, bank accounts, etc) a user can build custom rules to automate the distribution of their paycheck. Our hope is that this will improve the amount of people who save and invest their money, when it is made radically easier.

How we built it

By using NodeJS as the backend, we built a highly customizable rule framework that allows for any combinations of rules to be added for managing income.

Challenges we ran into

Due to not having access to a real financial institution, we had to build services to emulate an employer and a bank to validate our rule engine. Additionally, working with objects in Javascript was something none of us were familiar with so composing even a simple rule engine proved challenging at first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to stand up all the necessary services during the duration of the Hackathon while also teaching ourselves NodeJD, MongoDB, and ExpressJS.

What we learned

That everyone on our team hates Javascript (mostly kidding). In all seriousness, we genuinely learned how web infrastructures, web requests, RESTful APIs, and nosql databases operate. It was a good learning experience.

What's next for Pipeline

We would like to convert Python into an actual utility that can be linked to existing financial services. Additionally, we would ideally like to convert the rule engine to a language with more native functionality such as Python, or higher performance like C++ or Go. These changes are not required at our current scale, but they make sense as with the potential for more users in a business setting we could see the number of transactions rapidly grow for each new user.