WorldWise

Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

SMEs lose money to currency conversions they never see coming. Banks convert foreign revenue automatically, without warning the business that a cost just hit, and the business has no way to predict it, no visibility into the fees buried in the rate, and no clear answer on when the best time to send money actually is. This lack of transparency affects any SME trading internationally, and it hits smallest businesses hardest, since they're least likely to have someone tracking FX costs closely enough to notice, and most likely to have remote hires globally, which introduces international costs. 

Idea Explanation

What is your idea? How does it fix the problem?

WorldWise is a currency-flow tool that sits across a business's existing accounts and watches incoming and outgoing payments by currency. 

• If no match exists and a conversion really is needed, WorldWise offers smart, target-rate auto-conversion (similar to Wise's existing converter) so the conversion that does happen, happens at a good rate. 

• If a matching future payment exists in the same currency, WorldWise recommends holding instead of converting — stopping the unnecessary round-trip before it costs anything. 

• A running savings tracker shows the business exactly how much unnecessary conversion cost has been avoided over time. 

Implementation

How do all the pieces fit together? Does your frontend make requests to your backend? Where does your database fit in?

Frontend: a web dashboard showing per-currency balances, upcoming inflows/outflows, and risk alerts. Built to make calls to the backend for account data, detection results, and conversion recommendations. 

Our plan, although not possible to implement, would be to use the WisePay API to help with conversion execution and FX rates, rather than building our own.

Backend: The database would be filled with account references, with links to the inbound and outbound payments from users to track the unnecessary conversions. The database would also include the monthly reports made to users filled with the recommendations. 

Challenges

What did you struggle with? How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge was realising halfway that our original idea( auto-convert at best rate) already exists as a mainstream feature across Wise and other competitors. We tried to include features that would complement the current infrastructure to make it more suitable for larger transactions. 

Accomplishments

What did you learn? What did you accomplish? 

Gained a much more extensive knowledge into FX trading and currency  

Next Steps 

What are the next steps for your project? How can you improve it? 

Our next steps would be to add more complex features, such as asset management for business and companies as most businesses don't just hold their liquidity as cash in the bank. Most businesses hold investments such as shares and stocks as part of their reserves. We dropped it for now because it touches on tax advice more than currency trading, but it would help businesses stay transparent on their asset management.

The asset management idea was, in a sense, when a business needs money for something (paying staff, expanding, buying stock), should it pull that money from cash, or sell some shares instead? And if it sells shares, which shares should it sell, because selling older shares vs. newer ones can mean a different tax bill, even if it's the same amount of money.