A team of Milton Academy students has developed an app intended to foster financial literacy among high school students.
Hugo Eechaute, originally from Singapore, is a senior boarding student at the school. He said he got the idea to create the app when he became aware of the starkness of income inequality in the U.S., and wanted to do something about it. Enter the StockSense app.
Eechaute started working on its development over the summer, he said.
The app includes a course on financial literacy and a gamified program to progress through, inspired by Duolingo, which Eechaute believes is unique to StockSense. It also includes a stock simulator, a chatbot, and a news-aggregator for relevant financial information. It’s meant to be an all-in-one financial education app for users, he said.
Eechaute is the founder and serves as CEO of the StockSense team. Two other Milton Academy students, Simon Farruqu and Isabella Alba, are COO and CFO of the team, respectively.
“I wanted to tackle this like an entrepreneur,” he said. He learned coding to develop the app’s interface himself, and then hired a professional to bring it to competition.
In all, Eechaute said he has invested $5,000 into the app so far.
The app is geared towards students aged 15 to 21. Eechaute and the StockSense team tested the app at Milton High School, and received positive feedback from 90% of the participating student testers.
It launched on the Apple App Store two months ago, and has approximately 500 users so far, he said. Before the end of the month it will also be available for download on Google Play.
Eechaute’s father, Frederic Eechaute, is a hedge fund manager, and provided significant input on the content of the financial courses. He previously ran Instinct Capital in Japan, which in 2010 was the top-performing Japan-focused fund.
The StockSense team has partnered with the Ashwin Teen Financial Academy, another youth-led financial literacy organization, to include its courses on the app as well.
They are hoping to advertise to banks that offer student brokerage accounts, with the goal of sponsorship. Eechaute sees the app as benefiting the banks by encouraging student users to become long-term account holders.
Eechaute is headed back to Singapore after he graduates from Milton Academy to perform obligatory military service. He intends to continue work on StockSense throughout.
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