Every loan comparison site asks the same question: which bank has the lowest rate?
That question has almost nothing to do with whether the loan will ruin you.
A 6.2% loan you can barely service is worse than a 6.8% one that leaves you room to breathe. A rate that resets after twelve promotional months is not a 6.2% loan at all. And none of the twenty banks whose products you are comparing has any interest in telling you that.
So we built Vaya around the question people are actually asking, which is: if I take this, can I still live?
🔗 Live demo: vaya-project.vercel.app — no signup, nothing to install.
👨💻 Source code:
Vaya — AI Loan Advisor for Vietnam
Vaya is a conversational AI loan advisor that compares loan products across major Vietnamese banks. Users describe their borrowing needs in natural language — "I have a house and want to borrow 12 million for studying" — and the system collects what's missing through natural dialogue, then returns ranked recommendations with full financial transparency: monthly payments, DTI ratios, risk assessments, eligibility recovery steps, and cashflow survival analysis.
The platform is built on one architectural contract: a deterministic Decision Engine owns every number, and the LLM only talks. The engine (pure functions, zero LLM involvement) filters, prices, scores, and ranks. The AI layer extracts intent, converses with the customer, narrates pre-computed results, and answers policy questions via RAG — it never calculates, scores, ranks, or decides eligibility.
Target users: Vietnamese consumers evaluating loan options across multiple banks.
Core value proposition: Unbiased, explainable loan…
What it does
Describe your situation in one sentence. No forms, no wizard. The homepage is a chat input, because that is the product. "Car loan ₫800M, income ₫30M/month" is enough to start.
It compares real products from 20+ Vietnamese banks. Rates, maximum amounts, terms, processing time, LTV caps — side by side, sortable, filterable, with the actual bank logos so you know who you are dealing with.
It simulates the repayment against your cashflow. Full amortisation, month by month. What you pay, what is interest, what is left. Charts you can hover, not a single number in a box.
It gives you a survival score. This is the part I would show you first. Vaya runs a Monte Carlo simulation over your income, expenses and existing debt, and tells you the probability that the loan pushes you underwater — plus DTI, PTI, LTV and disposable income, each with a plain-language explanation attached. If a loan is risky it does not just say "not suitable"; it suggests borrowing less, extending the term, increasing the down payment, or which expenses to cut to get back into safe territory.
It flips the market. There is a marketplace where you post an anonymous request and banks bid on it — the reverse of shopping across twenty websites. Every offer is displayed next to that bank's own public listed rate, because the gap between the two is the entire point. Banks see your amount, term and income band. They never see your name, phone or email.
It speaks three languages. English, Vietnamese, Chinese — everything, including the AI's explanations, not just the navigation.
And it has a proper dark mode, if you are the kind of person who checks. Toggle is in the navbar; right-click it to hand control back to your OS.
Screenshots
1/ The homepage hero (chat input front and centre -> product-centric)
2/ The survival score page — the most distinctive screen
3/ The marketplace with bank offers stacked against listed rates
4/ Bank screener
5/ Magic Bento
6/ AI chat
Video
Under the hood
Tech stack
<MagicBento /> for the feature grid
A few things I enjoyed building more than expected: the reverse-auction board has no AI in it at all — it is a forum, and forums already work. The whole survival engine is pure functions, which meant the report generator could reuse it without a single API call. And retrofitting dark mode onto a 5,500-line stylesheet that three people were editing daily turned out to be the hardest CSS problem of the project, by a distance.
Where it came from
Vaya was built for the Alibaba Cloud FSI Hackathon by a team of four. Results are announced on 11 August, which means it is currently in that nice window where I can only improve the parts nobody is judging.
If you want the longer story of how it was built — the product decisions, the tooling, what we got wrong — the team wrote it up here:
I would like your eyes on it
Genuinely, not rhetorically — the demo is open and takes about two minutes:
Three things I am unsure about and would love to be argued with on:
- Is the survival score legible to someone who is not a finance person? It is the most valuable thing in the product and the easiest thing to over-engineer into noise. Try it and tell me whether the number means anything to you.
- Does the reverse-auction marketplace feel like something you would actually use, or like a mechanic that only makes sense to the people who built it?
- Chat-first homepage — right call or annoying? We deliberately did not build a landing page with a "Get Started" button. Some people love it. Some people scroll looking for the marketing site.
Drop a comment with what broke, what confused you, or what you would cut. I will reply to all of them.
