Cache, cashing in on savings!

Link to Cache

User Story

During the past 20 years, and more recently in the last 10 years, savers have been completely disincentivized by financial institutions to save money. In the 1990s consumers were given interest rates of 8-10% for keeping their money in Singaporean banks. Today, that rate is close to 0%.

What does that mean for an entire generation of millennials and under-40 consumers? It means that the money people save doesn't earn any return unless they take a lot more risk and invest in the stock market or less liquid assets like real estate.

Meanwhile, technology has given us the opportunity to better understand consumer behavior, and we know that for most of us, we spend much of our discretionary income on the same things... food, travel, clothing, technology and that once in a while special experience.

We created Cache as a way for savers to earn a very high risk-free return, like interest from a bank savings account. Except that "interest" comes in the form of rewards from consumer partners that want younger consumers to come through their doors.

People in our plan can earn as much as 12% on each dollar they save over the course of a year! That's real savings that can be spent on great consumer partners. And we even give them 25% of those savings in cash back!

For our consumer partners it's a great model for customer acquisition as most of their investment is coming back to them as consumers must spend their Cache rewards dollars at the participating consumer partners.

The Analysis

The project required a lot of programming code for formulas. We first created a financial analysis based on various assumptions, and used these numbers to hard code the static pages like the public analysis. For the private analysis, we needed to code formulas to address various user inputs. Below is a snapshot of our analysis for the project on MS Excel.

Design and Functionality

1. Users can explore the public pages of the site but are asked to sign up for more details
2. Users must register and login with a username and password. They are asked to create a profile with their bank information and goals.
3. A private analysis is generated based on the financial figures users input.
4. Users can deposit or withdraw from their Cache account.
5. Users can view their rewards balances and redeem from their rewards.

Entity Relationship Diagram

Languages & Applications

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript using Node.js framework
• Ruby on Rails v. 5.0.2
• Integration with Postico, a cloud-based database
• Deployment on Heroku

Project Team

• Cara Chew
• Ian Chong
• Vikas Garg
• Bao Ling Koh

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our fellow students and instructors at GA Singapore for their encouragement and support throughout this project!