FinTech Hack @ATDC: Show me the (smart) money
The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) partnered with two global payment giants Worldpay and TSYS to host the second annual FinTech Hackathon on February 12, 2017.
The two sponsor companies presented financial technology challenges for each team to tackle, adding an IoT twist to each. Worldpay and TSYS opened up their APIs to enable the hackathon participants to build viable solutions to real world problems.
“We felt like there’s a lot of applications of our new set of APIs across the board, including IoT, but also web and mobile,” Scott Carter, TSYS’ group executive of Digital Innovation, told ATDC. “There’s tons of ideas and tons of things you can do with those. We felt like this was a good opportunity for us to expose what we’ve done to this audience because we thought we’d get a lot of unique ideas and things that, quite frankly, we wouldn’t have thought of on our own.”
Some of these innovative ideas included Rewards N Go, a Pokemon GO-like experience to unlock location-based rewards and discounts. Zen Spend created a "like Tinder for your money" application allowing users to build better financial habits by swiping left or right on their financial transactions based on whether or not it was a healthy spend.
Hackathon veteran Barrett Davis, who has won first or second place in eight other hackathons, led his team to victory with a platform called Carculation. For this triumph, the team won $12,000 in cash as part of the grand prize of $79,000 in cash and prizes.
The idea spun out from Davis' work at State Farm. He told ATDC, “I work at State Farm and do different things on the connected car side. I was researching different IoT platforms and noticed that none of them have a revenue panel. Almost all the IoT platforms are just focused on analytics and monitoring and seeing all the devices, but not really a usage-based way of making money. So we created Carculation to do the numbers crunching and used Worldpay’s API for usage-based transactions.”
Interested in connecting with other FinTech folks? ATDC hosts a monthly FinTech Circle for entrepreneurs running FinTech-based startups. Register to attend an upcoming event.