Financial Simulator
This is collaborative project between IMSC, the Marshal School of Business, and the USC Credit Union explores how interactive multimedia technologies can be brought to bear on a novel application domain of financial services and products. We address this idea by providing a "simfinance" marketing tool that allows people to model their finances and perform "what if" tests to see the impact of the financial products on their net worth over time. This project entails the construction of a simulator that shows the impact and benefits of various life events and bank services to the user's monetary quality of life. The purpose of the application is primarily educational, where the game helps users in visualizing how decisions involving major expenditures or long-term investments affect their monetary well being. Playing this game might teach people to be better savers, investors, and decision makers with a more clear perception on how various financial decisions can result in the long term. Secondly, this can be a means for Banks and financial organizations to promote financial schemes in a novel and comprehensive way. This would provide users a friendly and personable interface for playing with bank scheme options in various combinations with other financially critical life events and decisions.
The concept is a multimedia game that lets users see how a sequence of financially critical decisions and life events might affect their economic situation over a period of time. This economic trend is indicated to the user through a graph over time that shows net worth, spending capacity, and/or debt according to the user's choice along a determined time span. The curve is generated by a financial simulation engine that runs in the background and which takes into account the user's initial profile and the sequence of financially critical events entered. The application has a set of icons representing some commonly encountered financially critical events such as a car loan, retirement investments, opening saving accounts, marriage, child birth, job changes, etc. These icons can be dragged and dropped onto the aforementioned 'Wealth Curve' at a particular year on the horizontal axis. The 'Wealth Curve' can reshape itself accordingly to show what the predicted economic panorama of the person for the given sequence of financial events.