EllieSavings started as a strategy assignment for 2 business classes, and actually, it started as a project to research requirements for an app that encourages retirement, aimed at Gig- Workers in the United States. But after completing a course in Risk Management and reading about Singapore’s Central Bank’s (MAS) Sandbox, and conducting 13 User Interviews in 5 countries of Southeast Asia, I will try to pivot the project to this audience because of costs. And if successful, I can expand the market to the United States.

For the strategy classes, I had to figure out how to monetize the app by predicting the audience’s “Willingness to Pay” (WtP), and the vendors cost, as well as do analysis on Ghemawat and Rivkin’s Competitive Advantage strategy. In addition, I read extensive literature on Fintech Regulation from Randall Duran’s textbook and writings in LexisNexis.

After the User Interviews, I sent some UI screens to 4 participants, 2 in Indonesia, 1 in Singapore, and 1 in Vietnam., and determined that I needed two types of users: Basic and Sophisticated, although both types of “Savers” would use fractional denominations. I hope to integrate some ideas that helped me pay my accumulated student loans of $146,000.00 in 12 years.