Inspiration
Our inspiration came from personal experience with budgeting, impulse buy, lack of spending concepts and not planning ahead with our finances. We find it difficult to imagine how much we are REALLY spending with we buy a 50 dollar dress from H & M or 200 dollar air pods. I often wonder how much I spend relative to my income and past months.
What it does
Our chrome extension, Swipend, offers a STOP to relentless SWIPPING your debit or credit card. As e-commerce grows more of more popular, most young people are doing all their shopping online. Studies have shown that not having the physical cash exchange makes easier for people to spend their money. In addition, with so many credit funds available, young people often fall into the trap of spending more than they can pay back weeks later.
Swipend helps its users rewire their spending habits through positive and negative reinforcement of their spending habits, analytics of their spending trends, and blogs with tips on how to become more financially literate.
Habits: When you enter the checkout of an e-commerce website, Swipend will pop up with notifications about how close you are to your spending goals (or over), and either encourage or discourage spending based on past trends (i.e. how good you were with your money last month).
Analytics: By tracking your purchases, Swipend can provide up-to-date information/analytics to your money management apps or banking apps (i.e. my spending for TD app). This allows money management and your connection to your bank to be present even when you are outside of the app or mindset. This will allow you to be more conscious and aware of your spending.
Tips: When it notices certain behaviour, such as difficulty with paying off credit and debts, Swipend can direct you to more financial literacy resources.
Rainy Day: When the user starts getting too spend happy, we've given them the choice and autonomy to decide to lock away access to a certain amount of funds till a certain date, to avoid going over their daily limit and reaching their set spending goal. it is also there to help stop them from dipping into money meant for expenses, such as rent and car insurance.
How I built it
We created our prototype using Figma and made a very basic version of the chrome extension to display expected functionality.
Challenges I ran into
The major problems we ran into and overcame were creating the chrome extension with the limitations of javascript within a pop-up frame and understanding prototyping within Figma.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are very proud of the fact we were able to cover most of the basic functionality and map out how it would look and behave.
What I learned
We essentiality learnt a good way to manage your time in such a way everything that needs to be put across is conveyed without dwelling for too long.
What's next for Swipend
We want to incorporate gamification into the app, to help further appeal to our audiences. Where we were looking to include this is the Rainy Day section, so in case they had to access a certain amount before the date its set to be released back to them, they would have to pass a couple of quick timed memory games to unlock the money. We also want to add the choice to choose between kind or stern statements for notifications when they are about to go over their set spending limit, depending on whether they prefer to be shown tough love or need words of affirmation to reign in their self-control. We would like to also introduce a rewards system for meeting their set saving goal for the period of time they chose, whether weekly, biweekly or monthly.
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