Founded in East Lansing in 1937, MSUFCU, also known as the MSU Federal Credit Union, provides various financial services to students, faculty, and staff at Michigan State University. With 21 branches, over 300,000 members, more than $6 billion in assets, and nearly 900 employees, it is the largest university-based credit union in the world.

MSUFCU provides a variety of financial education resources to its customers to ensure they are making the best monetary decisions possible. One of these resources, acquired by MSUFCU’s Credit Union Service Reseda Group, is a banking app known as Spave. Spave is a mobile application that allows users to donate a small amount to chosen charities every time they make a transaction.

Our Spaving: Giving based on Spending Habits project enhances the Spave mobile application with a recommender engine, providing users with recommendations for which charities the user should consider donating to, as well as alerting them to these recommendations.

Our most significant addition to this mobile app is a new recommendations page where the user can see the various suggested charities. These recommendations range from simple comparisons to other users, to recommending charities they may enjoy donating to based on how they spend their money.

Users can like or dislike recommendations to influence what is recommended to them. Recommended charities can be clicked on to present the user with further information regarding the selected charity.

Our front-end additions to Spave are built using Android Studio, Xcode, React Native and Typescript while the back end utilizes Express.js, Node.js, machine learning and Amazon Web Services.