An independent community of athletes and players in the US aims to impact lives of student athletes by providing them financial literacy. The organization focuses on preparing student-athletes for life, where they can draw a better understanding of the economic value of the education as well as lifelong personal financial management skills.
Educating student athletes to better manage their finances through the use of technology
Athletes and players often struggle to manage their finances post retirement from their professional sports. Unplanned spending and investments perpetuate the athletes on the path of financial crisis.
To address the problem, the client wanted to roll out a user-friendly financial education and career development learning tool to create a factual learning environment via financial lessons, bill payment, and managing other optional expenditures through a simple monthly engagement. To enable a widespread user adoption of the application, the client collaborated with colleges and institutions nationwide.
The organization partnered with Persistent to help them work on their mission. As a digital consulting partner, we evaluated their requirements and the associated challenges that could pose threat to smooth operability if left unaddressed.
Scalability: The application should be built on a robust cloud-based platform to ensure high scalability.
Easy to use interface: The solution should have easy to use, intuitive user interface for a quick and hassle-free user adoption for traditional desktop or browser experience as well as supporting tablets and smartphones.
Hosting, managing, and analyzing data: The client wanted a solution that could host and manage aggregated data along with analyzing it for better decision making. The solution should enable flexibility of integration with third party analytics software.
A holistic solution that caters financial literacy with proactive career development
Persistent evaluated several alternatives to devise a solution that could encourage athletes to take up financial education in an engaging manner. Ultimately, they decided to follow an agile development approach to engineer a robust app based on Google Cloud Platform. The application assists students throughout their college career, proactively advises them in fluctuating financial environment, suggests occupational prospects, trends, and advanced networking tools to connect with alumni and peers. The solution is available on web and mobile.
The application helps users with:
Provisioning easy learning and managing finances: The app helps student-athletes stay more aware about appropriately managing their finances through informational lessons, videos, articles, and quizzes. The solution clearly suggests and notifies users on email about all outstanding bills (housing, meal plan, etc.), amount due, due date, and status (pending, overdue, paid, etc.).
Career development: The app updates user’s educational profile information and work experience and compiles it into a resume. The resume is a comprehensive compilation of details related to education, experiences, and GPA, which can be directly posted on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
The solution is the face of personal financial education for student-athletes backed by robust technology that helps the client to ensure:
Disaster recovery and high availability: Google Datastore is replicated on multiple datacenters which ensures that data is highly available. The auto data backup scheduler moves the data to Google Cloud Storage every day. In case of disaster, data can be recovered from the last backup taken. Since the application is hosted on highly scalable Google Cloud Platform, its availability is 99.9%.
Analytics and smart reporting: Student-athletes can view performance reports, investment versus budget in a graphical format to effectively understand and manage their transactions. Admin can extract monthly/weekly reports for their students with information related to lessons completed, investments, budget, savings etc.
The solution helps student-athletes:
- Effectively understand personal financial management
- Identify and connect with their peers, alumni, and industry veterans to tap career opportunities
- Inculcate responsible spending habits
The implemented solution is user friendly and innovative, and helps student-athletes efficiently cope with real-world pressures to effectively manage and plan their finances while staying aligned on their path to planning and developing their career. The one-on-one financial guidance is tailored to a user-specific circumstances and needs. The solution helps them clearly understand ‘where are they are’ with an actionable advice to reach ‘where they wish to be.’
