Founded in 1937, Michigan State University Federal Credit Union offers financial services to members of the Michigan State University and Oakland University communities. With 280,000 members and over $4.5 billion in assets, MSUFCU is the largest university-based credit union in the world.

As the age of digitization progresses, banking has become increasingly automated and impersonal. Now, more than ever, it is imperative for businesses to provide a more personal, engaging experience for consumers.

Our Hopes and Dreams system is a hyper-personalized banking platform aimed at understanding members’ financial needs and life goals to ultimately provide a better, more personal user experience.

As a user first logs into the Hopes and Dreams application, they are prompted to complete a short quiz. This quiz helps our system understand each user’s spending needs and goals on a more personal level.

With a deeper understanding of our users, Hopes and Dreams provides personalized offers and spending tips, tailored to each specific user. An example tip from our system might be: “to afford your dream trip to Europe, you should spend less money at Starbucks.”

Our offers and tips are generated based on a user’s quiz responses, as well as demographic spending data related to a user’s income, age, and spending habits.

Users can also set their own spending goals and keep track of their progress through any of their iOS or Alexa devices.

Hopes and Dreams is available on Amazon Alexa, and mobile devices running iOS. The CRM is available on all web browsers. The iOS app is built using Swift, and the website is primarily HTML, CSS and PHP. All applications call an API running Python Flask.