TaxJungle - Help expats choose their perfect Swiss residency

During the last three weeks of the Full-Stack Development Bootcamp, our students worked on a platform called TaxJungle. The project opportunity was provided by Keen Innovation AG, a company located in Basel, Switzerland, that provides forward-thinking digital solutions in the local and global FinTech ecosystem. With TaxJungle, Keen Innovation AG aims to help the roughly 40k foreigners who move to Switzerland each year to choose their place of residence by offering intuitive tools and thus building a relationship with users.
 

 

The goal was to rebuild the existing functionality from scratch (except the API providing the swiss taxation data) while improving it wherever possible,  adding a new social component that allows for interaction with the users, and providing informative content on various finance-related topics. Our students managed to develop an interactive map of Switzerland to calculate (based on individual configuration) and compare expected taxation rates between cantons and municipalities. For the interactive map, they chose D3 (instead of tools like Datawrapper) to create as few dependencies as possible and allow for better customization and future integration of additional data layers (e.g. average rental prices). The geological map data is provided by Swisstopo and the conversion to the needed TopoJSON format was done with Swiss Maps Generator by Interactive Things.

As a social component, a blog function was built that enables the creation, commenting, and sharing of articles for various finance-related topics (including a search function). Other functionalities and content include user authentication and profiles that can be edited and shared.


 

The outcome was a prototype of the platform, which is going to be further developed as follows: additional data layers will be added to the map, a rating will be given to each result, and a chat feature will be integrated.  Overall, the project was a great success. The requirements of Keen Innovation AG were met and our students were able to put their knowledge into practice on a real industry project.