Inspiration
The financial institution has always provided traditional investments, investing with profits in mind. However what makes them so different when all they care about is P&L and balance sheet? That's where Nestash comes in because we allow investors to invest with a purpose in mind (e.g Retirement, Marriage, Home, Children education) and in what they believe in or what represents the best (e.g Environmentalist, Supporting second amendment, Innovation).
We envisioned a future where every individual's investment portfolio not only serves a purpose but also represents them as an individual.
What it does
Our platform allows you to answer a few questions and provide the best-optimized yield with both purpose and personal values in mind from over 60 ETFs and Mutual funds. Our funds are displayed with a data visualisation to allow investors to understand what they are buying into.
The customer journey goes like this: A user will land on our site and start to answer questions like the purpose of portfolio that they are building (Emotion aspect) then the horizon for that portfolio (Short, medium, long-term) which will display the best optimize yield (1yr, 3yr, 5yr, 10yr) for their time horizon chosen. It then shows which "values" it falls under (Defenders, Environmentalist, Protectors, Innovators) so what you'll end up with is a portfolio with best optimize yield based on outcome and funds that represents you as an individual. Our funds are curated manually that is we went through all 900 funds and their holdings to best label them into relevant categories.
How we built it
Data Visualisation (Portfolio): We used a data science tool called Tableu to clean 900 funds over 18,000 data points and visualize them. This is done through extraction of funds data from Ishares (Blackrock) using .CSV files. We have to clean the data both manually and using automation because we have to develop the algorithm to run through Tableu to sieve through the best funds based on YTD (%) and based on historical data.
Website: The website is built using HTML5 to allow rapid development for a proper functioning site.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge we ran into is the data that we are trying to extract. Cleaning out irrelevant data sets while building an algorithm that shows what we want to display to our users. There's only one finance person in our team and he basically had to develop the algorithm and look through all the data sets alone to figure out which data point do we care and what do we need to remove. You can imagine having someone going through 18,000 data points.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
-We are able to display the data on our site with Tablue integrated that shows exactly what we want to display based on our algorithm. Historical data + Yield + Funds direction (Based on holdings)
What we learned
We learnt alot about the finance industry and it was everyone's first try on data science with Tableu. Although it was a pain to pick up at first everyone got a hang of it after running multiple data sets.
What's next for Nestash
We are going to do an initial test among millennials and validate if people actually prefer personalize investments. After which we are going to implement in onto mobile for easy access and look into machine learning technology that is going to sieve through the number of funds coming in real time and integrated API's from multiple financial insights providers (Morning Star, Bloom Berg, Blackrock).
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