Inspiration
When it comes to investments, many people ask: How am I doing? Investors interested in impact and sustainable investing, however, are asking a different question that has long gone unanswered: Are my investments aligned with my impact goals?
Seesaw Wallet aims to help investors make investment choices that contribute to sustainability. We are trying to make investments strike a balance between profitability and sustainability, which is reminiscent of a "seesaw", where an equilibrium is achieved.
What it does
Seesaw Wallet is a web app that suggests investment portfolios based on user's expectation for profitability and sustainability. It also has an interactive tool to display an overall profitability and sustainability index based on the stocks users pick.
How we built it
The process of building this platform consisted of two stages:
- Data Collection and Algorithm Development: We collected data about companies which are contributing to sustainability. We analyzed multiple datasets to make basis for our indexing algorithm. Using multiple parameters such as latest price of stocks, contribution to CO2 emissions, we developed an algorithm to rank companies according to user's expectations for sustainability and profitability.
- Application Development: We built a backend server and frontend application. Backend served as data aggregator, and interacts with frontend to generate a list of companies matching user's investment goals. We designed out UI/ UX and developed the font end to achieve the following: a form page to understand user's preference on profitability and sustainability, displaying companies based on user's input, an interactive page for user to visualise the overall sustainability and profitability score based on his/hers portfolio chosen.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge we ran into was at data collection stage. We don't have access to professional finance information libraries (e.g. Bloomberg, S&P) which will limit the number of datapoints of the company information. In addition, we did not have any dataset that contains info about companies' sustainability actions. Therefore, we had to source multiple websites, and combine several datasets into one. Furthermore, we were challenged by time limitation to implement all the front end interactive features.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have successfully deployed our application, and it is outputting what we expected initially. We are also proud that we have come up with an accurate algorithm to rank companies according to sustainability and profitability indexes. Another thing we are proud of is that we used multiple technologies, such as Python, Spring boot, React, to accomplish our goals.
What we learned
We learned to build an application that integrates with multiple other applications. This kind of software architecture was new to some of our team members. Some of us also learned how to collect and combine corresponding data from several sources.
What's next for Seesaw Wallet #blackrock
In the future, Seesaw Wallet can be substantially improved with data about all companies' sustainability activities and stocks. We want to also make the app personalized so that it generates daily/weekly recommendations for user's goals. Also, we want to make the database a continuously updating one (constantly scrapping the most recent stock data from reliable sources). Another thing is to integrate our app with trading websites, so that after investor confirms his/hers portfolio, he/she could right away make the trades seamlessly.
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