WagBank

Inspiration

We realized that while everyone knows they should budget and save, most people find finance apps very boring. Traditional tools just track transactions, they don’t engage you and people just ignore them and forget about it. But people never forget to feed or check on their pets. So we thought, what if your savings habits powered a pet? This was how we came up with WagBank: a gamified, AI-powered financial assistant that makes budgeting fun and rewarding.

What it does

Pet: Every transaction updates your dog’s health and happiness. Save → happy, growing pup. Overspend → sad, skinnier pup.

Instant Feedback: An XP bar moves with every event — deposits, purchases, self-loans, repayments — no waiting for weekly summaries.

Smart Budgets: Paychecks auto-split into categories (Coffee, Groceries, Rent, Fun, Savings). Overspending triggers live feedback.

AI Assistant: “Can I afford Red Lobster next week?” or “Freeze Starbucks” and get instant advice or actions.

FraudShield: Suspicious spending? Instantly freeze a merchant or get warned about unusual transactions.

How we built it

Front End: Designed in Figma then made in React.

Back End: Supabase for authentication, budgets, transaction history, and real-time updates.

AI Layer: Gemini API interprets user queries like “Can I afford NYC in 3 weeks?” and combines account data with live external info to generate smart responses.

Demo Tools: We added a “Demo Toolbar” that triggers paycheck deposits, overspends, loans, and fraud events live.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was having our app be demo ready. Since this app was meant to be a continuous tracker of your finances, it was hard for us to have a demo prepared that would show all the features of the app, however that is why we decided to create the demo tools to allow us to mock budgeting over time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of the UI we created, one of our main goals was to make the platform as engaging and fun as possible and we were able to do that through our custom sprite animations.

What we learned

One of the main things we learned was how to manage an app that has a ton of features. It was definitely not easy and with this experience we learnt time management and brainstorming is one of the key factors in the design process.

What's next for WagBank?

One of the main features we want to implement next is connecting it with smart devices such as Alexa and Google Mini for budgeting at your fingertips. We also want to integrate real cards and banking history instead of using mock data. Having a better reward system where users can check out their points for vouchers, gift cards or even cash returns would also be a great incentive for our app. Lastly, we want to add fraud ml that would be able detect anomalies in your transaction history.