The European Commission and a jury of experts selected LiquiNow (aka WeStayLiquid) as a winning team of the digital finance challenge: Speed-up access to financial support. Help us defeat the economic impact of the Coronavirus by joining us in the EUvsVirus Matchathon. Pleaser register here in order to participate to the matching process as a sponsor.
Insolvency Outlook 2020
Coronavirus Pandemic has massive economic consequences on European’s SMEs and Freelancers. They are most likely to go bankrupt in the upcoming months.
To limit that risk of bankruptcy in the Eurozone, EU-Institutions and Member States have promptly provided financial aid and assistance measures. Yet, Freelancers and SMEs are facing a bureaucratic jungle to access them: it’s terribly time-consuming and complex to find the relevant financial aid. They get lost easily.
25 million of EU-28 SMEs need these two problems to be solved, as much as the 10 million Freelancers.
The solution proposed by LiquiNow
What's the value proposition? Users of LiquiNow reduce their application process to financial aid from 6 hours to 20 minutes. Thanks to the guidance provided and making the completion of application forms more accessible and less bureaucratic.
What do users get out of it?
- Gain #1 We deliver a fast, easy and user-friendly way to find the right financial instrument of the EU funds.
- Gain #2 We remedy the bureaucratic, obsolete and difficult-to-understand processes of applying for EU financial resources.
- Gain #3 We bring transparency and ensure data protection.
What is the impact potential of LiquiNow? If only 1% of the 35 million of EU-28 SMEs and Freelancers uses the platform and saves only 35 min this platform will save 35 million work hours.
How does the platform work?
Our solution is designed to generate a real social impact on EU members. First, we relieve pressure on the SME ecosystem (e.g. EU institutions, government, banks, accounting firm, tax advisors, chambers of commerce, and various agencies) by providing digital guidance, mapping of funding opportunities and application support.
Second, by adopting a software architecture based on the principle of least privilege (POLP) to offer decentralizing privacy and IT-security. Meaning that SMEs and Freelancers’ data protection is guarantee.
Lastly, we believe social value is unlocked only when partners co-create together. Our platform enables that. It is a true Pro bono philosophy. That is the reason why our team pursuits a keep-it-simplearchitecture goal. We provide a free and open-source software under MIT licence to allow for spin-offs in the EU member states. To promote free knowledge we advise the license the databases under the CC 3.0 BY-SA license. LiquiNow is a white label solution. The idea is to build all together a pan-European framework that is easily and sufficiently customizable locally.
What does it do for SMEs and Freelancers? LiquiNow uses advanced technologies to make it simple:
- Our data-driven platform is accessible and free of charge.
- We trust user experience is key and we made it enjoyable.
- Our project combined AWS, Svelte and Legal Design with modern UX/UI technology (i.e. Chatbot) to simplify the application forms, lower the bureaucratic obstacles and speed up the filling out.
- EU-28 SMEs and Freelancers must only answer 7-10 questions to identify the financial aid available and suitable, with the related form. No more endless research. We speed-up the first financial aid submission from 6h to 20min.
How about a demo?
Please visit we-stay-liquid.eu and tpa.
Prototype Completion Our first use-case is www.wir-bleiben-liqui.de, a platform where we are currently making 160 financial instruments accessible to freelancers and SMEs. The platform includes the following five modules: Waiter - Menu - Sommelier - Order - Delivery:
- Waiter: a dynamic decision tree which asks users 7–10 questions and queries a database with this information.
- Menu: a structured presentation selected database entries of interest to users.
- Sommelier: advice on the presented options to assist users with their order.
- Order: a chatbot-type UI which guides users in filling out relevant application forms, resulting in a downloadable PDF/A3 with embedded json files and the information encoded in a QR code. Completely handled in the user’s browser.
- Delivery: a plugin to process PDF uploads through a website delivered by email. Opening APIs to employ fraud prevention measures. Embedding the json files and QR code means that cloud-based OCR (optical character recognition) services are not required to read out the document.
A basic version of Waiter and Menu are available at www.wir-bleiben-liqui.de. https://github.com/TimMaa/liquide-bleiben
A basic server based version of Order was implemented by U:DO and is avilable at: https://kurzarbeit-einfach.de/
A poc for creating pdfs clientbased can be found und: https://github.com/cpetig/liquide-bleiben
LiquiNow's challenges
LiquiNow is looking for partners to accelerate its market readiness and adoption.
- Public: Endorsment by a ministry of said member state having the ministry set up the framework and fill the database. Who can also embed the finder as a white label solution on their homepage.
- Universities: A reknown university could allow a couple of PhD students on the project and make the service publically available. The tech could be hosted on said universities infrastructure.
- NGO: European-NGO or local NGO like a "chamber of commerce" knowledgeable regarding the financial instruments to spin up the technical infrastructure.
- ProBono Company project: Companies with sufficient operative capacities and reputation to finance the tech infrastructure and its setting up .
LiquiNow is also looking for digital volunteer to contribute to the project:
- UX designer,
- JavaScript developers,
- PDF/A3 skills.
LiquiNow's future
Our European team is committed in further developing our project and already starts to follow-up in the aftermath of hackathon. To make the solution sustainable and maximizing the social value creation, we are focusing now on five EU-Member States: France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Another country hardly affected to be define with our partners.
LiquiNow's origins
The pan-european solution framework is based on the two best-practice projects www.wir-bleiben-liqui.de and U:DO both placed in the Top 20 of the #wirvsvirus Hackathon of the German Government and their combined learnings gathered by being operational for five weeks. The quick execution was made possible by a mix of advanced technologies (aws, svelte, legal design, chat bots) combined in an open decentralized keep-it-simple architecture as free and open-source software.
On 24-26 April, the team expended to a EU-level by participating to the EUvsVirus Hackathon and welcomed Euro enthusiast team-mates. WeStayLiquid was born. The 30 April, we celebrated our victory and since then work actively to prepare the EUvsVirus Matchathon. On 16-18 May, as part of the rebranding strategy WeStayLiquid changed to LiquiNow.
One-Pager and Business Plan
To receive our materials, we kindly invite you to join us during the EUvsVirus Matchathon: 22-25 May. Register here to the Matchathon or contact us at: hello@we-stay-liquid.eu
#EUvsVirus #HackCOVID #TogetherWeCan #HackTheCrisis #StrongerTogether #ProjectsForLife
Built With
- amazon-web-services
- express.js
- svelte
- vix