QuickVest SmartStart

Delivers an AI-guided, gamified onboarding flow that answers questions, autofills from documents, and helps new investors open accounts with confidence.

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Inspiration

  • Account opening is tedious and causes a lot of failure; we wanted a friendlier, faster path for first-time investors with a friend by their side
  • Fidelity sponsor track at HackNC ’25 challenged us to rethink onboarding with real user value.

What it does

  • AI-guided, gamified flow that answers questions and explains choices in plain English.
  • Scans docs (e.g., ID) to autofill fields like name/address.
  • Routes all chat to /api/chat via an Express proxy so the Gemini key stays server-side.

How we built it

  • Frontend: React + TypeScript (Vite).
  • Backend: Express (TypeScript) proxy calling Gemini (gemini-2.0-flash)
  • UX: Figma prototypes; iterative tweaks based on quick user tests.

Challenges we ran into

  • Getting the API calls to actually work with our key
  • Accidentally pushing the key to prod and messing up
  • Figuring out how to make the experience fun for users

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Figured out how to utilize a proxy for APIs
  • Integrated a GenAI API into a real project

What we learned

  • The importance between the separation of AI features
  • The power of rapid prototyping to give a vision to base our progress around

What's next for QuickVest SmartStart

  • Knowledge progression + fractional rewards (site-wide level tracker).
  • Smarter “Vesti” assistant with market/news grounding and guardrails.

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