## Github Repository

<https://github.com/deltahacksiii/deltahacksiii>

## Inspiration

Loaning money can be difficult, especially when interests rates are so high, and many loan sharks seem to have alterior motives when you can't find other means. Some groups have an increased difficulty due to their situation; they may be immigrants with a language barrier, refugees without a credit history, or people with a lower income striving for an education. What if there was an app that provided a trustworthy platform for more open minded loaners and put the focus back on benefitting borrowers as much as possible?

## What it does

Lendr is a reverse-auction loan community where borrowers can post an amount of money they need to loan, and lenders bid on lower and lower interest rates; the lowest rate takes the deal. Lenders are matched to borrowers in a tinder-style queue. A lender can swipe right on a loan and make a bid for a lower interest rate if they find the profile of the loaner to be promising and trustworthy, or they can swipe left on the profile if they are not interested. This way, every loaner gets an ideal match with minimal interest charged and a personal connection to a lender. The process just becomes a lot more fun and welcoming.

How can the world of finance benefit from this idea? These loans and money transfers can take place on the platforms of financial institutions, and can help future customers build up a sense of responsibility. Banks can take action on the bidding too and earn some extra income. Keeping track of all actions occuring on the community can provide some interesting insights and analytics about the industry and the current state of the economy.

## How we built it

Lendr is a web application built with the Node.js framework, the Express framework, and MySQL. We made use of the Cloud9 IDE for quick setup and collaboration. We also have a fancy landing page made with Wix.

## Challenges we ran into

Sending information to ourselves from the frontend proved to be harder than we expected. We had to look into some hacks/workarounds and ended up settling on an invisible form method. We were all new to Node.js so that was also a challenge to get started on.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working product! We are excited to see how people will use and interact with our project.

## What we'd do differently...

Node.js was rewarding to learn, but we would have worked on a mobile application if we had more time for the setup and learning curve. A full software stack such as MEAN would have made it easier to set up the database and build nicer looking views. We'd also like to reorganize and separate our code and implement a real sign-up/login process rather than having everything wide open.

## What's next for Lendr

A mobile version for users on the go!
Payments done completely through the app/website and/or partnerships with banks!
Integration of algorithmic, real-time bidding!
A media centre with testimonials, articles, and follow-ups from users!
Machine learning to prioritize the loan match queue!
Handling personal finances can be a challenging task, and there doesn't exist a natural user experience for engaging with your money. Online banking portals and mobile apps are one-off interactions that don't help people manage their money over the long term. We solved this problem with Alex.

We built Alex with the goal of making it easier to stay on top of your finances through a conversational user interface. We believe that the chatbot as a layer of abstraction over financial information will make managing budgets and exploring transactions easier tasks for people.

Use Alex to look at your bank balances and account summary. See how much you spent on Amazon over the last two months, or take a look at all of your restaurant transactions since you opened your account. You can even send money to your friends.

There were a few technically-challenging problems we had to solve while building Alex. We had to handle OAuth2 and other identification tokens through Facebook and bank account information to ensure security. Allowing the user to make queries in natural language required machine learning and training a model to identify different intents and parameters within a sentence. We even attempted to build a custom solution to maintain long-term memory for our bot—a still unsolved problem in natural language processing.

Alex is first and foremost a consumer product, but we believe that it provides value beyond the individual. With some additions, banks could use Alex to handle their customer support, saving countless hours of phone calls and wasted time on both ends. In a business setting, banks could learn much more about their customers' behavior through interactions with Alex.
## Inspiration

After being overwhelmed by the volume of financial educational tools available, we discovered how the majority of products are focused for institutions or expensive. We decided there needs to be an easy approach to learning about stocks in a more casual environment. Interested in the simplicity of Tinder’s yes or no swiping mechanics, we decided to combine the 2 ideas to create Tickr!

## What it does

Tickr is a stock screening tool designed to help beginner retail investors discover their next trade! Using an intuitive yes or no discovery system through swiping mechanics, Tickr the next Tinder for stocks. For a more in depth video demo, see our [original screen recorded demo video!](https://youtu.be/dU6rF8vymKE)

## How we built it

Our team created this web app using a Node and Express back end paired with a React front end. The back end of our project used 3 linked Supabase tables to host authenticated user information, static information about stocks from the New York stock exchange and NASDAQ. We also used the [Finnhub API](https://finnhub.io/) to get real time metrics about the stocks we were showing our users.

## Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was setting the scope into something that our team could complete in a weekend. We hadn't used Node and Express in a long time, so getting comfortable with our stack again took more time than we thought.

We were also completely new to Supabase and decided to try it out because it sounded really interesting. While Supabase turned out to be incredibly useful and userfriendly, the learning curve for it also took a bit more time than we thought.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

The two accomplishments we are most proud of are our finished UI and successful integration of the Finnhub API. Drawing inspiration from Tinder, we were able to recreate a similar UI/UX design with minimal help from pre-existing libraries. Further, we were able to design our backend to make seamless API calls to fetch relevant data for our application.

## What we learned

During this project we learned a lot about the power of friendship and anime. Some of us learned what a market cap was and how to write a viable business proposal while others learned more about full stack development and how to host a database on Supabase.

Overall it was a very fun project and we're really glad we were able to get our MVP done 😁✌️

## What's next for Tickr

Our next goal for Tickr is to finish off the aggregate news feed function. This would entail a news feed of all stocks swiped on and provide notification. This would help improve our north star metric of time spent on platform and daily active users!