PennyWiser

PennyWiser's value proposition
Midnight coding spree

Inspiration

We noticed that many college students start their financial journey without access to credit cards and struggle to build a credit score. This often leads to missed opportunities and higher interest rates later on. We wanted to create a tool that helps students simulate financial credibility while learning healthy spending habits, so they can confidently step into the real world of credit.

What it does

PennyWiser allows students to track their spending, set budgets, and work towards financial goals. Based on their real transactional behavior and goal completion, the app computes a simulated credit score, giving them a tangible metric of financial responsibility, which they can choose to present to banks when applying for their first credit card.

How we built it

We built PennyWiser using Next.js for the frontend and Flask for the backend API. The frontend uses React components to display interactive charts, budgeting tools, and a chatbot powered by Google Gemini for personalized financial guidance. To compute the credit score, we trained a model on generated transactional data to estimate the score from spending history, testing multiple models on the same dataset to achieve the best accuracy.

Challenges we ran into

Pivoted twice, iterating based on mentor feedback.
No access to real banking data.
The Nessie API was difficult to work with, especially due to the lack of documentation.
Algorithm design was complex - considering multiple parameters and testing various modeling approaches (algorithmic/mathematical, economic, AI).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A clean, beginner-friendly UI that presents information to you in a gentle way, unlike many banking apps
Agile, lean methodologies backed up with multiple user feedbacks leading to final product.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about the limitations in financial literacy by surveying our peers.
We learnt how to effectively compute a credit score based on transaction history.
As they say, you only truly understand a concept when you can explain it to someone else. By making an app to improve financial literacy, we improved our own conceptual understanding.

What's next for PennyWiser

Collaborate with banks to work with real data and improve models.
Explore partnerships with student organizations and universities to integrate PennyWiser into financial literacy programs.
Gain enough credibility so that banks trust and value the simulated scores we give students.