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.
Top comments (3)
The positioning question ("if I take this, can I still live?") is genuinely sharper than every rate-comparison angle — nice work.
Two conversion notes on the landing page, since it's launch week:
I roast launch landing pages for a living and publish free one-line roasts of this week's launches at kimmy.inkboxwire.com/roasts — the pattern there might help tighten your hero either way. Good luck with Vaya.
Paahoo
When I was applying for a home loan, something that I noticed that definitely needs way more attention in home loans, is market stability and your economical durability. Scenario, you're a software engineer and you have a tech support side job. Evaluate how durable a software engineering role is for the loan term. If you're a .NET developer, chances are you'll have switched company atleast 3 times in 20 years, so while quite unstable, the real risk is that the hiring rate is in a steep decline for software developers, unless you're highly specialized. That should affect your loan affordability. If you have dual income, from different vendors (eg. your salary job and freelance), then your economical situation is very different. Depending how much you earn from each source and whether your side-job fluctuates and is scalable (i.e. if you lost your salary job, can you still afford the loan on your side-job with the free time you have), your situation changes. If your side-job can match your main job and both are sufficient on their own to pay the monthly loan fee, then your economical durability is solid, because having dual income streams beats having savings to pay a few months. These are things that banks dont even use to assess your credit, even though they're the most important indicators on whether you'll default in 5 years or not. You can spend your paycheck down to 0 monthly, if the first think you pay is rent/mortgage, you wont ever miss a payment. But if your job sector is unstable and in a decline, you're a higher risk, because there could be layoffs any day and you could be on the chopping block, regardless of how long you worked there. Then there's sector specific risks, eg. construction workers can get injured on the job any day of the week and be completely out of a career, vs short of complete paralysis, a developer can still do their job from bed on a laptop, so a construction worker would need much higher disability coverage, as opposed to a developer and even then, its 50:50 whether that payment is made early enough to actually step in when their salary disappears. That's more important to consider in affordability than how often you go out for drinks. In Namibia the default rate is steadily climbing, because of those exact reasons, banks wonder why people cant pay, but then never realize that it's 99% of the time due to a layoff or disability. Case in point, I was mandated to get life insurance, but they didnt specify how much disability coverage I need, let alone tailored to my profession, as a developer, if you're paralyzed, or blinded, you cant work... But also if you break your hand, or arm, these are things that separate each person to their individual situation and are the metrics that are far more important than gross earning and monthly spending. And yet, not a single bank takes them into consideration, nor do the people apply for the loan who eventually default.