Zap Pay

A quick secure method for personal payments

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Inspiration

Inspired by Capital One's challenge, we wanted to create a peer to peer banking experience. Learning from platforms like Venmo and Apple Pay, we explored new ways to make easy, quick, and secure transfers.

Group Messaging

Sending money to friends has never been easy. However, we often find ourselves pulling up the calculator to split Uber fares or pizza money. We wanted to create a method to easily pool money together. With Zap Pay's iMessage extension, a user can send a request to a group message, and the cost is split evenly between participants. This makes parties and festivities much easier when a host can just send a cover fee to be split by the attendees.

Secure Transfer

We wanted to create a private method for transactions. With platforms like Venmo, a username is usually required to send payments. With our secure transfer, no client device receives any information about other users accounts. Instead, a unique transaction code is created for each request. This unique code is sent either by iMessage or via QR, and the request can be fulfilled by the other client!

QR Payments

For quick in person payments, we create a unique QR code for each request. Another user can scan the encoded request, and the transaction is fulfilled. Because we use our secure transfer technology, no account sensitive information like card numbers or user names are ever shared. And unlike NFC payments, there is no signal to read or spoof. A camera-to-screen is a personal and secure process that reserves user data.

How we built it

We built a backend service in Python Flask and an SQLite database. In conjunction with Capital One's hackathon Nessie API, the backend is responsible for creating accounts and managing transactions. The frontend is an iOS application that enacts iMessage transfers or generates QR codes.

Challenges we ran into

The Capital One Nessie API had a system for creating transactions between accounts. Unfortunately the transactions would pend until they ultimately were cancelled. Upon finding no way to approve transactions, we created a database that coexisted with data from Nessie, and it supplements the completion of transactions by storing and altering account balances.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Our backend design took lots of thought and white boarding; we are glad to see that it works like we planned our use cases. 2) Secure transfers; we think it's great that no personal information has to be seen by other client devices.

What we learned

This was our first time using HTTPS requests from an iOS device.

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