ScotiaBank iSIM Lab

Inspiration

We created ScotiaBank's iSIM lab to tackle the rapid progression of youth investing in Canada, which is being led by major software platforms like Questrade and Wealthsimple. With the bank's long-term relations and trust built in its numerous financial services, we wanted to find a way for its investment opportunities to keep up.

Moreover, as young Canadians ourselves (new to the world of investing), we wanted a platform that would give us the knowledge and confidence to trade.

What it does

iSIM Lab is meant to provide young investors with a risk-free simulation space that personalizes investing to match your real portfolio. You can try multiple portfolio strategies, trade with real-time market data, and learn about terminology, strategies, and more throughout the entire platform. Our comparison feature allows you to look at the varying metrics for success between different portfolio strategies so you can decide what to pursue for your real portfolio. Moreover, iSIM's AI insights are built off a RAG LLM pipeline that looks at most recent news and Scotiabank's market interpretations to help users understand how the market moves in simplified language.

How we built it

We spent time going through the iterative design process to ideate a solution to Scotiabank's problem in loosing young investors to uprising platforms like Wealthsimple. We capitalized on the bank's strengths and looked for areas of improvement based on the educative material, trading confidence, simplistic UI and easy to use accounts that young investors are looking for today.

After drawing mock ups, we implemented our layered design on Figma, focusing on mobile development since that's the main device used for digital trading.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several initial challenges ideating a solution because we had to encompass financial growth for Scotiabank, user features that could compete with Wealthsimple and completely new features that could attract new investors.

In particular, we struggled creating a design that could make a simulative trading environment provide the maximum education benefits. This is why we came up with our AI insights and comparative features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to tackle this issue from multiple different angles, embodying a systems design approach to problem solving. Being able to turn our vision into an actual digital product that people can view real time makes our long process of ideation even more impactful and proves that this solution would carry significant weight if actually implemented within Scotiabank

What we learned

We learned the principles of integrating problem solving in a business/case context alongside creating and innovative technological solution. We also sharpened our skills in design engineering and using major builder platforms like Figma to bring visions to life.

What's next for ScotiaBank iSIM Lab

Next we want to convert our layered design mockups into a full-stack, functioning app. This includes creating a backend and frontend (specifically a React Native app) that showcases our core UI/UX features and functionality features. We also want to create a data fed RAG chatbot that showcases real market trends and can translate those insights into easy to understand terms for users. Being to translate this functional version of the product alongside Scotiabank's current iTRADE platform would make our idea highly usable.

Built With

• figma