UniFinance

UniFinance revolutionizes student finance, integrating campus financial life into one intelligent platform to foster healthy financial habits for life.

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Inspiration

Managing campus finances shouldn’t feel like a full-time job.
Students today are forced to switch between multiple disconnected systems—meal plans, budgeting tools, scholarship portals, payment sites, and campus marketplaces. This fragmentation leads to overspending, missed opportunities, and unnecessary stress.

We wanted to build UniFinance, a single intelligent financial platform designed to empower students with clarity, control, and long-term healthy financial habits.

What it does

UniFinance is a unified Smart Campus Wallet that brings every part of a student’s financial life into one seamless platform.

Core Features

  • Landing Page: Introduces UniFinance and showcases key features.
  • New User Signup: Students onboard by entering dining and initial budget data.
  • Budget Assistant:
    • Add transactions
    • View dynamic budget summaries
    • Track spending across categories
    • Receive AI-powered financial insights using Llama 3
  • Dining Assistant:
    • Dashboard with remaining meal swipes
    • View detailed dining data
    • Transfer swipes to friends
    • Receive personalized AI food recommendations
  • Scholarship Finder:
    • Enter sample student profile information
    • Receive automatically matched scholarship suggestions
  • CampusCoin:
    • Transfer CC to other users
    • Complete video verification for identity
    • Browse and list items on the CC Marketplace
  • AI Chatbot:
    • Ask campus, budgeting, dining, and scholarship-related questions
    • Receive clear explanations and personalized help powered by Llama 3

UniFinance simplifies and unifies student money management into one intelligent platform.

How we built it

  • Programming Language: TypeScript
  • Framework: Next.js
  • APIs: Llama 3 for budgeting insights, dining recommendations, scholarship guidance, and chatbot interactions
  • Tools: Vercel for hosting, routing, and deployment; Figma for design
  • Styling: TailwindCSS for a modern and consistent UI
  • Datasets: All datasets—including dining data, transactions, scholarship profiles, and marketplace items—were synthetically generated using AI
  • Architecture:
    • Component-driven pages
    • Modular design across Budget Assistant, Dining Assistant, Scholarship Finder, CampusCoin, and AI Chat
    • Synthetic data seeded into each dashboard to simulate real student usage

Challenges we ran into

  • Integrating multiple complex systems into one unified financial platform
  • Designing a cohesive user interface across all sub-applications
  • Generating realistic synthetic datasets under time pressure
  • Getting Llama 3 to produce accurate, context-aware recommendations
  • Implementing CampusCoin verification, transfers, and marketplace browsing
  • Managing multiple AI-driven features while keeping the overall experience simple and intuitive

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a fully functional multi-feature Smart Campus Wallet in one weekend
  • Designing a smooth onboarding flow for new users
  • Developing two advanced dashboards (Budget and Dining) with clean UI and navigation
  • Implementing a working CampusCoin system with marketplace browsing
  • Integrating AI-driven insights across budgeting, dining, and general student questions
  • Maintaining a consistent design language across all sections of the platform
  • Delivering a realistic, scalable prototype suitable for real university adoption

What we learned

  • How to architect a large-scale Next.js application quickly and effectively
  • How to design reusable UI components for speed and consistency
  • How to generate and utilize synthetic datasets to replace real campus data
  • How to prompt-engineer the Llama 3 model for multiple specialized tasks
  • The importance of simplifying complex systems into a clear and intuitive user experience
  • How to collaborate efficiently across multiple sub-features in a high-pressure hackathon environment

What's next for UniFinance

  • Integration with real university APIs for live dining balances, payments, and scholarship databases
  • Adding a complete authentication system with persistent student profiles
  • Expanding CampusCoin into a tokenized and secure micro-economy
  • Push notifications for dining resets, budget alerts, and scholarship deadlines
  • Building a full mobile app for iOS and Android
  • Adding predictive spending analytics and deeper financial coaching
  • Partnering with universities to deploy UniFinance as an official Smart Campus Wallet

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