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SimpleSaving Logo
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SimpleSaving Navigation
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SimpleSaving Info Page
Inspiration
Only 21% of Canadians have a strong sense of confidence in their ability to achieve their financial goals, and that's a problem!
To achieve their goals, Canadians should consider their saving and investing habits. However, there are so many resources that even knowing where to begin looking is challenging (and sometimes stressful)! Even when Canadians manage to find the relevant information, in the case of investing, it is often not enough to convince them to risk their hard earned cash in the market.
SimpleSaving helps Canadian build long-term confidence in 3 easy steps:
1) Awareness of how money can be a tool for helping you reach your goals and dreams.
2) Financial literacy and understanding economic factors.
3) Practice making financial decisions and knowing where to turn for financial advice.
What it does
SimpleSaving provides a single source of truth in an easily digestible and modern format. Users will have the opportunity to actually apply what they have learned through a financial goal simulator.
The basic flow of the app is as follows:
1) Collect basic user information (i.e. 4 questions)
2) Present relevant financial information and tips based on background
3) Allow users to test their understanding by making decisions in the simulator
4) Provide guidance through a TD chatbot (NOT IMPLEMENTED)
5) Provide users with feedback on their performance
5) Present TD as the key partner for achieving financial goals
How we built it
The proof of concept was built in Android Studio and boy was there a lot of learning done.
Our main layout consists of a Navigation Panel activity with many Fragment pages for our info section. The simulation section consists of Empty activities linked together through one Fragment activity that we altered to provide updates to the user on the performance of their investment. We then used financial investment data from online sources to perform financial performance calculations to provide feedback to the user.
Source: http://www.fundlibrary.com/funds.asp
Challenges we ran into
When deciding on a solution, the challenge was determining which one would have the greatest impact and benefit for Canadians.
When building the project, it was the first time learning and working in Android Studio for the majority of the team. The greatest challenge during the build was ensuring that all pages flowed as intended in a logical manner. From a UI perspective, we had to learn how to work with Navigation Panels in order to increase the ease of use. There were also challenges finding an appropriate financial data API and subsequently trying to scrape the data from the web.
When collaborating online, we encountered some difficulties trying to merge changes and handling Git errors.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a team, we are proud of how much we were actually able to learn in a short period of time. Although not the most visual compelling app, we were able to integrate the key functionalities and convey the heart of our solution. We challenged ourselves to apply new functionality and adopted a can-do attitude! (Just finishing a project is an accomplishment!)
What we learned
We learned how to incorporate Navigation Panels in Android Studio, how to collaborate in GitHub and how to drive an idea from conception to completed build.
What's next for SimplySaving
Future builds of SimplySaving would be visually polished and incorporate more advanced functionality such as API financial data pull and AI chatbot functionality.
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