Inspiration
Financial education is not widely taught in schools, and many people grow up without a solid understanding of basic financial concepts. This lack of education can lead to poor financial decisions. As we researched on the issue further, we noticed that according to a 2019 survey by the National Financial Educators Council, 63% of Americans aged 18-65 failed a basic financial literacy test. People often make financial decisions based on emotional factors or cognitive biases, such as overconfidence, loss aversion, or the availability heuristic. These biases can lead to poor financial choices. The rise of fintech and personal finance industry was our main inspiration to create the automated budgeting tools. The inspiration also came from a desire to leverage technology to simplify and streamline the budgeting process.
What it does
PhinnTech is a personalized financial advisor in the form of a chatbot. After uploading your credit card statements, investment portfolios, income details, and other relevant financial data, let us transform your data into financial advice tailored just for you!
How we built it
PhinnTech's conversational skills come from the power of Azure AI. Azure's toolbox enabled us to create a LLM that is tuned specifically for providing financial advice. The toolbox also allows the user to upload PDF documents for more personalized feedback. To allow our users to interact with our LLM, we made a frontend page using React.js and registered the phinn.tech domain to host our project.
Challenges we ran into
Some of the challenges that we ran into involve the process of hosting the project within the time constraint. We registered the phinn.tech (a pun on fin-tech), but we weren't able to host our project on this domain in time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Some of the accomplishments that we are proud of include the overall creation of the chatbot for financial management within a 36 hour time constraint. Furthermore, we are all very proud of our cohesive teamwork and the manner in which we efficiently communicated and carried out individual and team goals.
What we learned
Not only did we learn more about the importance of financial literacy, but we also gained hands-on experience in using emerging and capable technologies such as Large Language Models to build an accurate yet accessible solution for the masses. While building on our technical skills, the project also gave us an opportunity to build on our soft skills such as teamwork and communication.
What's next for PhinnTech
In the future, we plan to prioritize adding features to the application. We will incorporate tools for investment planning, debt management, or tax optimization. We will also allow users to customize the budgeting model provided to better fit their individual financial situations and goals. The more personalized the advice, the more valuable it becomes. Also, we can create a community or forum where users can interact, share tips, and seek advice from each other. A strong user community can enhance the overall user experience.
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