The problem Intraday Trading Platform for Financial Products solves

1. Remove unnecessary steps and players in selling/buying financial products (which exist today) by establishing a direct channel between Financial Institutions and Consumers and enable them to complete the end-to-end transaction through AA-enabled trading platform. This platform also solves the purpose of removing the information asymmetry that is inherent in the current financial ecosystem.

2. In the current financial ecosystem, there is no direct and easy way for the financial institutions to effectively reach out to the customers to sell their products and for the customers to explore various options available for their need and complete the transaction in a seamless and digital manner and especially consent-driven & without any documentation.

3. The timing of the consumers’ need for financial products, the availability of these products with the financial institutions and having consumers’ latest data (with the financial institutions) to complete a transaction greatly impact the whole experience. This also plays a major role in the overall success rates of these products. This gap has largely been filled by third party aggregators such as Paisabazaar and Andromeda, who work to source the customers for the FIs, procure the necessary documentation and build a conduit.

4. The Intraday trading platform we built using the AA framework tries to address all the current problems and challenges by allowing the consumers to make their data available at all times (through consents, ofcourse) to the financial institutions and also allow them to advertise their need for the various products by using the trading platform. This data is always available to all the participant financial institutions (in the trading platform) who can place bids for the applications.

5. For the purpose of this hackathon, we have just used loans as the financial products, but the trading platform can handle any financial products such as deposits, mutual funds, insurance etc.

Challenges we ran into

1. The current AA app we chose to use (OneMoney) did not provide us with the capability to build the trading platform, and hence we had to build one separately which will need to be registered as an FIU with the AA.

2. Choosing between multiple AAs that are available to build the data transmission mechanism for the Trading Platform. The platform will eventually be agnostic with respect to the several AAs as this will be a central platform that will be able to fetch data from all AAs.

3. The need for a call back URL to explore AAs restricted us from looking at other AAs.

4. The initial days (beginning of the hackathon), we encountered several 500 errors that were being thrown by the AA, which were resolved later once we got in touch with the respective teams.