How one Charlotte Urban Institute research intern plans to use technology to improve financial literacy
Editor’s note: The following article is the first in a series highlighting research initiatives led by Charlotte Urban Institute undergraduate and graduate research interns. Thank you for reading, learning, and imagining with the Institute, a Charlotte region where everyone has the resources, tools and support to thrive.
Vrishab Nooka has a passion to make complex financial information accessible to all through technology.
The UNC Charlotte sophomore and Charlotte Urban Institute research intern, who recently completed his first year as an economics and computer science major, has dedicated his early studies to research that focuses on how Federal Open Market Committee rates affect certain parts of the stock market – and how to make this information more available to the general public.
What are federal open market rates?
According to Investopedia, the federal open market rate, which is typically known as the federal funds rate, is the benchmark interest rate target set by the Federal Open Market Committee. It refers to the interest rate that banks charge other institutions for lending excess cash to them from their reserve balances overnight. The federal funds rate acts as the foundation for the entire U.S. financial system and heavily influences economic operations.
Various economic sectors are impacted by changes in the federal funds rate. Car loan rates, credit card rates, interest rates on loans and savings accounts, and real estate, among others. Understanding the federal funds rate helps us make sense of local changes we may see in our everyday lives.
“A big part of why I started this is because, while financial information is often available to billion-dollar companies, regular people like you and I might not have access to this to better invest in a plan for our future,” Nooka says. “So I wanted to take [these] data and use technology to harness a bunch of information that might not be available for a common person and make it easily available for them to create a financially stable future.”
What accessibility means to Nooka
Large-scale financial decisions have the potential to impact the lives of Charlotte residents. With fluctuations in federal funds rates impacting loans on a more day-to-day level, having access to changing information is crucial for residents’ financial planning.
And Nooka, who completed his Institute internship under the supervision of its director of public policy research, Liz Morrell, believes the solution to possible financial challenges are found at the intersection of economics and computer science. “[Federal reserve rates] make a tremendous impact on not just the housing crisis or day-to-day life, they play a huge part [in] the financial decisions we make every day.” he stated. “Many people don’t know that, so a lot of my research was identifying how those large-scale decisions affect tech firms and the stock market.”
Nooka’s next question was: How do we ensure the public has access to financial information that impacts their daily life?
“A big part of this [is] to help people understand what these federal reserve rates are and what these federal-level decisions are, and how they make an impact on the local economy,” Nooka explained. “The niche that we hit was identifying the financial literacy part, but we took in a lot of the stock market data, trading volumes and volatility, and we used all of this to identify best strategies that regular people can use.”
Nooka’s goal is to use AI and data visualization to simplify complex financial concepts and help people make financial decisions without having a background in finance. Whether that’s through interactive tools, personalized financial guidance or platforms that connect people with trusted resources, he wants to break barriers that prevent individuals from building financial literacy and confidence.
Nooka and his colleagues presented their findings at both the National Conference on Undergraduate Research hosted by Council of Undergraduate Research in Virginia and the Undergraduate Research Conference in Charlotte, both this past April, in order to highlight local interests.
Nooka looks to the future
Nooka’s future projects involve studying how human-computer interaction, or HCI, can be used to improve quality of life for Charlotte students. He also plans to study how AI tools can be used to enhance the student experience.
“I’m going to be working on an HCI project. We haven’t figured out exactly what it is, but one of the things we might be potentially working on is collaborating with our human-centered AI department that just opened up within UNC Charlotte to build a tool that students can use on a day-to-day basis.”