On 25th September2017, HUB13 organized Hack the Money, Finland’s fintech hackathon in Helsinki together with Visa, 4finance and the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority. 8 teams joined the 48-hour challenge to develop a digital financial service of the future.
The main goal of Hack the Money hackathon was to develop new value adding services utilizing Visa APIs. The challenge was not too strictly defined to give space for innovation, but contained guidelines to explore the following areas:
- How might we improve the accessibility of existing payment technology for those with disabilities?
- How might we make paying whilst travelling abroad easier?
- How might we transform payments in transport and mobility?
- How might we make SMEs lives easier?
“We are opening our network to enable developers to innovate on our platform and deliver new experiences, with the main focus on creating new digital payment solutions for consumers. These kind of partnerships with the startup world and with Hack the Money are the beginning of a new innovation era. It was very interesting to see all the creative solutions invented by the developers who participated to the event”, says Anthony Craufurd, Venture & Startup Director, Visa.
The attendees were existing fintech companies, individual fintech enthusiasts and technology consultants, teaming up to tackle problems in the world of digital payments.
After 48 hours of innovating, problem solving, coding and design, with very little sleep and pizza in late September, the teams pitched their end products to the judges, who were Majda Nogo and Simon Lockwood from Visa and Ilkka Ruotsila from NFT VENTURES.
The four teams chosen to advance to the finals were:
• Lumoin: with a solution for making life easier for construction SMEs by finding contractors, helping with paperwork and fastening payments.
• eTasku came up with a product for matching credit card transactions and receipts in real time.
• Bankify/Enfuce with their easy travel payment solution with P2P features and merchant offer utilities.
• Deloitte Digital/Mobiento, who created a service for making paying whilst travelling abroad easier by integrating payments to familiar services every traveller uses.
The finalists worked on their presentations for 5 weeks with the help of Visa innovation lab experts from London to nail their final pitch in Future Digital Finance Forum on 31st October in Helsinki.
The final judging panel consisted of Majda Nogo and Simon Lockwood from Visa and Pekka Ylihurula, the CEO of S-Bank.
The winner, who was awarded with a prize of 5000€ was eTasku.
“First of all, thanks to Pekka from S-Bank for agreeing to be part of the judging panel. His contribution was extremely valuable in deciding on a winner. The decision to choose eTasku was unanimous. We chose eTasku because they kept their presentation concise, clearly defining the problem they are attempting to solve, and how they would achieve this using the Visa API’s. By keeping their pitch simple they were able to concentrate on highlighting the benefits to SME’s meeting the brief of ‘how to make SME’s lives easier’ and most importantly presented what appears to be a scalable opportunity.”
