PerLoan

Easily get the money you need when you need it most

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Inspiration

Less than half of Americans (44%) say they can afford to pay a $1,000 emergency expense from their savings, according to Bankrate's survey of more than 1,000 respondents. Our hack is crucial as it aims to address a prevalent financial challenge encountered by millions of Americans everyday.

What it does

PerLoan is a revolutionary peer-to-peer lending service which allows people to request loans from others at a lower interest rate than traditional banks and credit cards, decreasing the burden on them, while also providing lenders with a way to grow their savings. People can either loan money to others via "campaigns", or they can start their own campaign! This is linked with your credit score so these loans can be used to increase your credit score. We are also using PropelAuth to minimize account fraud and implementing a unique approach through our Artificial Intelligence model to minimize loan fraud, revolutionizing the loan industry.

How we built it

We built it using several frameworks. The front end is created with React Native, while the back end is created using Node.js, Cloudflare suite, and PropelAuth. Specifically with Cloudflare, we used Workers and D1 Database, which is a serverless SQL database, to store and manage information about the users. We also used several ML models and libraries.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to use PropelAuth to create the authentication for our application. However, we learned that it is not supported for mobile applications, so we were clueless as to how to proceed. We had chosen React Native solely cause of our believe that PropelAuth will work on it. None of us are familiar with React Native vs Flutter. We learned that thankfully there was a beta version of PropelAuth for React Native. We reached out to PropelAuth, and they were able to swiftly grant us access to the beta. Our app would not even be possible without their quick assistance.

We still struggled to implement it, considering the limited support we had beyond documentation, leading to numerous errors and hours of working with their API and authentication services. After several hours, we managed to make a breakthrough, allowing us to PropelAuth to secure our application!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of overcoming the challenges that were presented to us and creating a cohesive application that stayed true to our initial vision. We created a Figma to represent our game plan and we closely followed to ensure we stayed on track and on schedule.

What we learned

We learned how to confidently use Figma to create a prototype model of how we wanted our application to be designed, including page navigation. We also learned how to effectively use React Native, after much headache attempting to produce dev builds. We also learned a lot about back-end development and building AI models.

What's next for PerLoan

We plan on further polishing up the UI to create a pleasant user experience with the app, and overall, prepare it to launch and help our fellow Americans who aren't as financially secure. We also hope to put this to scale and make our product "real", hopefully changing the loan industry in the process.

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