EL MONEY: my final project at Ironhack
Final project ahoy! OMG, what to do? We had a totally open briefing before us, the options were endless! I decided to start from something I love: traveling. Among many things, I thought about my friends who live abroad, one of the reasons I choose a destination sometimes. I knew most of them still had financial issues here in Brazil and I was curious to understand better how they handled their money here and where they lived.
I started with a couple of interviews that helped me to shape up my research. Both the interview and the research were directed to people who had bank accounts in different countries. I got to talk to Brazilians living in the US and Europe, but also to foreigners who are living in Brazil. I asked them about long term planning, budgeting, secondary accounts, currency and how they manage their money on a daily basis.
From these conversations I noticed that most of them evaluated their control over their financial lives very highly, which not always leveled with the answers they would give me regarding financial matters. One of the main reasons was the disconnection between their money when allocated in different countries. There were different banks, apps and currency they needed to use at the same time.
In order to get a better visualization of the user pains points I built a journey that tracks since the moment the user gets an opportunity to move out of his or her home country to the day he or she leaves to go back home or to move to another country. That showed me many financial obstacles that the users need to overcome when moving their life to another country, but at the same time I discovered some solutions that help them along the way. Some examples:
-The user that tracks their expenses on a daily basis uses apps dedicated to budgeting or their bank app
-For transferring money overseas with excellent rates and speed most of people use Transferwise
-For those who travel a lot, a great solution available in the market is the borderless bank Revolut
A lot of bases were already covered, so I decided to try to fill a different gap: offer a solution that would help people to break the walls they see between their money so they could count every penny in every currency and at the same time organize their patrimony in a way that makes sense to them.
I figured it was best that this platform would be in the format of a website. The reasons for that would be: there would be a lot of information, in which case a desktop offers a better screen to visualize it; besides that the users declared to check their secondary accounts only a few times a month, a frequency that doesn’t justify to download an app.
The final result is a website with a modern and secure look where you can synchronize your financial information through your bank, your broker or an app that you already use for money management. After synchronizing all of your patrimony, you can organize it by currency, country or personalized tag and you can also track its evolution and the total amount in any currency you wish. Finally, it is possible to keep track of specific exchange rates and even include alerts for them so you can get a notification in your phone or email.
The main challenges were: defining a theme for my final project (when everything is an option it is harder to choose one) and designing a solution for a problem/situation that I have never been through.
I am gonna miss the days at Ironhack as a student…but now i get to go there as a teacher assistant! Really glad to start professionally in this field that i know it will only grow :)
