A digital solution for crowd-lending catered to the youth and small enterprises of Singapore
Everyone loves small businesses, from the local bubble tea shop around the corner, to the bookshop at the near by shopping complex. These businesses are the ones that we remember, and are where memories are made. However, these same businesses are the most at risk of closure during periods of economic hardship - a situation we are currently in due to the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic.
Our aim is to help users choose to provide spare capital to these businesses to help keep them alive. This is our vision of the "vote with your wallet" idea. We want to help make this process easy - we want to be the catalyst that keep these cherished businesses alive.
We provide a platform to help connect consumers to businesses in the form of unsecured micro loans. We want to connect people with their local businesses and give them the option to support these businesses especially during tough times like we are experiencing right now (COVID-19).
Enterprises can offer a rewards for these contributions through discounts or other means - we encourage them to be creative. However, this is entirely option. But, it is recommended if you businesses want to bolster their claims for contributions.
To achieve our goal to connect users and businesses, we have developed the RiPay app.
With a simple and easy process to sign up and verify your information, you will be setup in our friendly and easy to use ecosystem.
With that, supporting your local business with low interest loans is but a moment away. Swipe right to express interest in supporting a business you love, or left to find more options.
If you want to learn more, tap the card to explore more information about the businesses you cherish.
Businesses looking for capital can create a profile on the app.
They can then create a goal amount, as well as provide information justifying the loans and potential rewards for lenders.
Limitations of the Hackathon mean that we weren't able to fully implement all our ideas. The first area of the app that should be implemented if given more time is the enterprise side of RiPay, where businesses can sign up for loans and check their funds. This area of the app will allow businesses to do the following:
- Create a profile
- Create a Microcredit Loan
- Establish rewards and discount at the business' discretion to reward loyal customers
The second area of improvement is in the social aspect of this app. We wished to establish RiPay as a tool for communities that look out for one another, and a good feature in such an app would be leaderboards, spotlights on neighbourhood businesses and promotions for investors.
Communities should be able to support their businesses and in-turn, businesses should be able to service the community, thus, our swipe-style app creates an online presence for apps. An improvement would be a map tool for users to see their favourite businesses in their own neighbourhoods and close to them so that the experience of connecting with their community is amplified.
Another area of improvement is in the security of the app. We would have liked to implement 2FA as well as the e-KYC process (which is implemented but buggy) better, so that users' security is always ensured. Furthermore, we see value in creating a global communities through the implementation of the Visa API.
We are very excited about the strides we have made with our app, but given the limited time we made practical decisions to limit the scope of our product. In the future, we hope to introduce several more features including:
- A Leaderboard of contributions and returns
- Razer Gold integration
- Offering loyalty rewards
- A referral system to increase adoption
We are a group of friends who decided to participate in the 2020 Razer FinTech Hackathon.
Our team includes
- Vibhu Krovvidi
- Raghav Bhardwaj
- Ojus Sharma
- Apoorva Ravi Balasubramanian
- Business: Class for business information
- BusinessCardAdapter: Helper Class for Business
- Constants: Helper methods
- Deposit: The Activity where deposits are added to the current account of a user
- Details: The details of a chosen business from the Business activity
- FocusSnackBar: Custom SnackBar
- MainActivity: Driver class and activity
- NRICActivity: KYC Activity to handle NRIC input upon registration
- PrimaryActivity: Swipe-form catalogue of Businesses
- Profile: Current User's Profile, displaying balance etc
- RegistrationActivity: The driver class for registration of new users
- TransferComplete: A confirmation page upon transfer
- User: Class for customer information