KB & StartupYard Hackathon Produces 11 Projects, 3 Big Winners

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This past weekend, over 50 developers, founders, idea makers, and designers got together at StartupYard’s homebase, Node5, and hacked for 48 hours (actually only 47 hours – we lost an hour to daylight savings), using data provided to attendees by Komercni Banka (KB), for our first ever joint Fintech Hackathon. The Hackathon focused on the swiftly approaching Open Data mandate for European banks, PSD2. KB provided anonymized customer usage data, of the type that the PSD2 standards are most likely to require that banks make publically available via API.

Winners were those who provided feasible projects that might have the highest impact on KB, or any bank’s ability to provide better customer experience in a rapidly changing landscape, contributing to “The Bank of the Future, Wherever You Are.” 

11 Projects

In total, the hackathon produced or advanced 11 projects in Fintech, ranging from VR, to personal finance applications. Attendees were also mentored by nearly a dozen experienced mentors from StartupYard, KB, and the fintech industry. In attendance were KB’s Deputy Director of IT, David Svejda, KB’s Head of Innovation Monika Drobna, and of course KB’s CEO Albert Le Dirac’h.

Reception of the results from the KB team were overwhelmingly positive, and in addition to the 3 official prize winners, 3 teams from the 11 were also invited to apply to the next round of acceleration at StartupYard, Batch 8. 

Head of innovation Lab at KB, Monika Drobna, checks out a VR concept from VRTheBest

3 Big Winners

The weekend saw 3 outstanding teams walk away with prizes of 10,000 CZK, 6,000 CZK, and 4,000 CZK per team member. In addition, the winning team will get the chance to pitch the KB board of directors personally this week, and will have a chance to join C-level executives from KB for a private lunch. Here are the winners:

1st Prize: Paystory

Billed as “Payment History 2.0,” paystory showed off a prototype of a data platform that will help banks and their customers get fine-grained details from merchants and online retailers about their transactions, including keeping track of warrantees, receipts, invoices, and product information.

2nd Prize: Blocknify

Comprised of members of two StartupYard alumni (Personal Finance Manager BudgetBakers and Investment Intelligence Platform Decissio), Blocknify promises to make verifying the authenticity of a contract as simple as scanning it with your smartphone. With a combination of public blockchain and QR codes, Blocknify allows signatories of important contracts to feel secure in the knowledge that they are always signing exactly what they’ve agreed to.

3rd Prize: SDK Finance

SDK Finance an existing fintech company, took 3rd place for its use of data provided by KB to create an open API platform for PSD2, the standard by which all European banks will, starting in 2018, be required to allow 3rd party platforms to access certain transactional and account information.

 

Special Prize: VRTheBest

Though the team was not selected as cash winners, KB designated a Special Prize for the members of by far the most speculative and futuristic team to participate in the hackathon: VRTheBest. VRTheBest, in just 47 hours, mocked up an entire virtual bank branch, and a handful of very futuristic tools, inside a 3D environment using an Oculus Rift developer kit. Though the project was considered to be reaching too far into the future to merit a win, KB chose to single out the team for their outstanding work, and stunning presentation.