Inspiration
Our world and society are ever-changing. The multiple conveniences we experience in one day could not even be imagined by those just 20 or 30 years in the past, such as the existence and accessibility of smartphones and computers, the creations of multiple vaccines to combat various diseases, and various quick and affordable methods of transportation.
The multiple advents of progress have not only bought us entertainment, transport, and safety but have also introduced new schools of thought that expose multiple companies for behavior that, at one point in time a few years ago, would seem normal. It bought us SRI investing or investing for good.
Until a couple of decades ago, the concept of Socially Responsible investing, or investing for good, hadn’t been founded, nor had its principal ESG values (Environmental, Social, Governmental considerations) been practiced by companies. As a result, greedy companies and profiteers who only concentrated on the capitalistic aspect of business focused purely on making profit, leading to profit being made at the expense of employees and the environment. Accidents like the Chernobyl Disaster, which took the lives of many factory workers and citizens, as well as the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, a large-scale marine disaster, became more common occurrences than one might expect.
While these incidents have served as catalysts to inform investors to base their investment decisions more heavily on SRI principles, we are still far away from creating the ideal investment world where people can be more informed about the values and behaviors of the companies they choose to invest in.
We created our app, Finix, with the intention to teach investors, regardless of age and experience, about SRI investing’s history, ESG values, SRI investing’s motivation, and how to incorporate SRI investing in company and personal life.
What it does
We have provided a link to our website in our Devpost submission. If you click the link to our page, you will see the following screen with 4 buttons titled learn, Ranking, lookup scores, and create your portfolio.
The first option, learn, will take users to a page where they will see a chatbot and a quiz. If they interact with the chatbot, you can learn about Socially Responsible Investing, such as its history, its principle ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) values, investors motivation to continue ESG investing, how companies, regardless of size can incorporate SRI investing and ESG principles to create profit and approaches to incorporating ESG investing in personal life. We also have a small quiz for users to test their knowledge of SRI investing.
The second option on our home page, ranking, will show the top ten companies with the best ESG scores. Clicking on any of the cards on the page will bring users to yahoo’s live price data site so they can see how their stock is currently faring in the stock market, or how stocks they are interested in are doing.
The third option, lookup scores, allows the user to look up the ESG scores of a stock ticker. Users can check whether the ESG scores of their stocks are low, average, good, or the best. We support 400 tickers in our data set.
The fourth option, create your portfolio, allows the user to create an SRI portfolio. Users can enter the stock ticker of a company and the dollar holding. Users can enter multiple positions in different stocks to get their portfolio’s overall ESG scores.
How we built it
We built our website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and hosted it in the Qoom platform. We created our chatbot using IBM’s Watson Assistant. We researched data from several sources on SRI investing, as well as information about the ESG values of each of the 400 companies we support in our database ( https://www.statista.com/)
Challenges we ran into
The first challenge we encountered while working on our app was creating a good name (that we both agreed on). We originally had the idea of taking the 12 names we had come up with and doing a random raffle to find out which name we wanted to use but decided against that in favor of using an online name evaluator to check which name was the best. At first, it seemed as if the name evaluator we had chosen had been grading our names too harshly. However, we eventually found that one of our names had the highest score, Finix.
The second challenge we ran into occurred when we were trying to create our ranking page when we tried to add the ranking numbers of each stock to our page and ended up not being able to link some of the stock web pages to our ranking cards.
The third challenge we encountered while working on our app occurred when we were trying to calculate the overall ESG scores of each company in our create a portfolio page. While this idea seemed relatively easy to implement, it was actually a real challenge to create a calculator-like program capable of creating the overall ESG values of a user's portfolio using weighted averages based on stock dollar holding and ESG scores of each company.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of the things my sister and I are extremely proud of in our website is our "create a portfolio" page, as it was the most challenging page to create since we had to be able to make an extremely complex program that would be capable of calculating the overall ESG values of a user's portfolio using weighted averages based on stock dollar holding and ESG scores of each company in a very short time frame.
What we learned
Through our collection of data about SRI investing and statistics about the number of companies that actually follow SRI principles, we learned how important it is to be able to teach investors about the value of SRI investing, and how, without it, companies would solely focus on making profits at the expenses of the environment and their workers.
What's next for Finix
We hope to add more tickers in our data sets in the near future, as well as make it mobile and tablet friendly, so we could teach more investors or budding investors about SRI investing and how to check whether the companies they have invested in are truly moral and ethical.
Citations
https://cloud.ibm.com/ https://www.qoom.io/ https://www.statista.com/ https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-and-governance-esg-criteria.asp https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/education/education-understanding-esg-investing.pdf https://www.esl.org/resources-tools/educational-resources/esg-investing-part-one#:~:text=The%20Evolution%20of%20ESG%20Investing%20The%20first%20form,companies%2C%20particularly%20alcohol%2C%20tobacco%2C%20weapons%2C%20and%20gambling%20companies. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/five-ways-that-esg-creates-value
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