Ri$e | Devpost

Inspiration

Through research, we learned that only 21 out of 50 states in the United States require high school students to take a personal finance course, leaving college graduates and other working-age adults unprepared for the complexities of savings accounts and retirement funds. With both being vital to future financial security, we wanted to design an app that could provide educational resources and money management tools in a fun, engaging way. We were inspired by apps that track water-drinking habits through the growth of a plant. While financial security was a key aspect of our inspiration, we were also inspired by our personal curiosity and questions about financial literacy. Our hope with Ri$e is to educate, inspire, and help bring financial literacy to everyone.

What it does

How college graduates and working-age adults approach financial management during their first years in the real world after college often sets the pattern for their financial habits down the road. In response to the lack of financial literacy and financial management plans such as savings that is common among college graduates and working-age adults during their first years at work, our platform Ri$e aims to provide interactive and practical ways to encourage a sustainable saving habit while educating them on financial terms and concepts.

Our three main focuses consist of a feature that allows users to save their spare change from their everyday transactions, set monthly saving goals while allowing users to visualize their savings progress over time, and lastly an education feature that guides users to learn more about personal finance related terms and concepts.

One common misconception about savings is that you need to save an ample amount of money at a time in order to make a significant impact. Our feature ‘Spare Change’ seeks to clear this misconception by encouraging college graduates to adopt a saving habit at an early stage by starting with little amount - as little as some spare change. ‘Spare change’ is a feature that links to the users’ credit card and allows users to round up their daily transactions and start saving with their spare change. While setting up spare change, users are able customize their preferred rounding options.

Another key feature of Ri$e available to users is an option to set personalized monthly saving goals while allowing users to keep track of their savings progress over time in an interactive and engaging manner. Progress is represented by bread, which rises and bakes as users meet their savings goals over time. Once the bread is completed, users can redeem special rewards from participating companies and businesses.

A final feature is the implementation of a chatbot where users can chat with a virtual assistant to get answers to questions related to savings and personal finance. To further the educational value of Ri$e, we integrated the “Learn & Grow” section on Capital One’s website into a collection of bite-sized articles and other educational resources that allows users to improve their financial literacy.

How we built it

We started off by researching our client - Capital One. We used Figma to create frames and prototype the app.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we hoped to gamify the experience. However, we realized it would be too ambitious to develop a narrative and design and build the game. With the limited timeframe, we decided to abandon the idea of gamifying the experience but striving our best to make the app as engaging and interactive as we can.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We primarily focused on interface design and we are really proud of the aesthetics and straight-forwardness showcased in our final design We sought to tailor our solution to Capital One by integrating our solution with the banking services and features provided by Capital One i.e. Capital One Journey Credit Card, Capital One 360 Performance Savings and the “Learn and Grow” section featured on the Capital One’s website

What we learned

Through developing the project, we deepened our understanding in personal finance related concepts and topics. Technically, we learned to build wireframes, final designs, and prototyping our final designs with Figma.

What's next for Ri$e

Add a feature to allow users to view an overview of how much “bread” they have collected or saved over time. To complete and further improve the user flow, e.g. work on the “make a deposit” screens, dashboard showcasing breakdowns of “deposit” and “total savings”. Work on mobile app development.