ATDC

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The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech is hosting its second-ever FinTech Hack @ ATDC competition from Feb. 10 through Feb. 12.

The competition is sponsored by Atlanta-based Worldpay US — the global payments technology and services company and creator of ATDC’s FinTech Program — and Columbus, Georgia-based TSYS — a leading global payment solutions provider. (REGISTER HERE)

Participating teams will compete for cash, gadgets, and professional-services prizes valued at approximately $100,000. The grand prize winning team will receive a prize package valued at approximately $79,000, which includes $12,000 cash.

This year’s theme centers on the Internet of Things, specifically, wearable financial technology (FinTech). Sponsors are supplying: Raspberry Pis, sensors, Legos, and Amazon Dots. (Please note that teams have to return the hardware.)

Participants will decide which ideas to tackle using sponsors’ APIs. They can work on their own projects or work on challenges presented to them by the hackathon sponsors:

WORLDPAY US’ CHALLENGES:

(WORLDPAY API Challenges and Conditions: https://www.worldpay.us/fintechhack2017)

  • Life in a big city:
    • The Situation: Nancy lives in the country and hates having to find a parking spot when she comes into the city. She never knows the best place to park, and is intimidated with all of the options. So also hates waiting in a line to pay for it when she leaves. Most of the time she is visiting a business that validates her parking, but she often forgets to get the ticket stamped.  Nancy also doesn’t underestand why some lots are more expensive than others.
    • The Challenge to Solve: How can we take away some of the pain that Nancy is subject to and create a seamless payment experience at the same time?
  • I want it all and I want it now!:
    • The Situation: Rick is a big-wig at Yoyodyne and he has little time to himself outside of work. Like everyone else he needs to eat and keep his house clean. Life is too short for Rick to spend time on Amazon or running to the store, but the man has to be clean and fed. He hates running out of critical consumables like coffee, the elixir of life.
    • The Challenge to Solve: How can Rick get products to take care of themselves and take away the burden of everyday shopping?
  • Lazy is as lazy does:
    • The Situation: Beth hates paying bills, especially for those things the she has to pay every month. She knows she has no choice but to pay for the utilities. Still, it seems like a waste of her time to have to do this.
    • The Challenge to Solve: For those devices in the house that know how much they consume, have them arrange a way to pay for themselves directly with the supplier and allow Beth to ask her brand new Amazon Dot at any time, how much money it is going to cost for the various utilites and any other information that might help her improve her bills.
  • Mo’ Money:
    • The Situation: Marion is a small business owner who is always trying to maximize her earnings. As a former actuary, she knows the power of data in helping to make decisions. She suspects that her credit card sales might have correlation to environmental factors. By knowing this correlation she could help improve her business.
    • The Challenge to Solve: Help Marion develop an aide that will take in various situational data like various weather readings, local event schedules, traffic patterns,  room conditions like lighting and indoor temperature to determine how they affect her credit card sales.
  • “I want. To be. Alone.”:
    • The Situation: Joe is blind but he loves to get out of the house and shop. Unfortunately, this can be a difficult task in finding what he wants. He really can’t tell how good something looks on him. He even can’t get an idea of the color of something unless he asks an associate. Joe does not like sales associates.
    • The Challenge to Solve: How can we allow Joe to become more self-sufficient and not have to talk to a sales associate in choosing and buying his products in the store?

TSYS’ CHALLENGES:

  • Enable a more responsible financial lifestyle:
    • The Situation: Casey’s parents have a credit card. She see’s them charge on it constantly — sometimes up to its limit.  It has a 19% interest rate, which is pretty high. She’s tried telling her parents it’s not good to have such a large balance on the card, unless they pay it off monthly. Casey wants to know about tools that will help her and her parents manage their card balance more wisely but also help them lookout for deals and promotions that could help them save money. Her parents eat out a lot. So she’d like them to see the money being spent there so they can better manage it. But it would also be nice to know if their favorite restaurants are preferred merchants of the bank that issued their credit card. If so, they may actually get special rewards or discounts for eating there.
    • The Challenge to Solve: Create a tool that allows better management of card spend through things like budgeting tools, spend coaching, alerts, interest rate comparisons, and local deals and rewards.
  • Create a convenience-oriented travel experience:
    • The Situation: Jake likes to travel and usually has enough money to take a small weekend trip once every month or so. He likes new places and he also likes open air concerts. In fact, he’s in the app store now looking through travel apps that could help him find a cool place to go this weekend. But all the apps there have the same problem: they want him to do all the work. “Why can’t I just enter the money I’ve got and find some cool events or places to travel to,” he thinks to himself. Or maybe he could enter a specific event and an app would return a hotel, flight, car service, etc. that gets him from “curb to curb”.  Wow, that would be nice. But alas, no such things exist. He stops looking for apps and instead thinks “back to a web search.”
    • The Challenge to Solve: Create a travel search that makes it simpler to explore new places or events, based on the money I have to spend (or rewards). Do the work of arranging air, hotel and car service so I don’t have to worry about it.
  • Make payment accounts more intelligent:
    • The Situation: Robert is a software engineer. He uses his payment account for very specific things: computers, books, and the occasional visit to the coffee shop around the corner. Last week, Robert’s payment card was stolen and charges from dance clubs, online poker rooms, and brick-and-mortar retailers began appearing that he never visits. Being a software engineer, he thinks, “It’s 2017, isn’t this problem solved? I live in Midtown and I only use my card for certain things…everything else should be locked down. Why can’t my payment account be smarter?”
    • The Challenge to Solve: Enable payment accounts for use only when it meets my criteria and behaviors for spending — either configurable by a user or not.
  • Voice enable payment accounts:
    • The Situation: Jennifer is kind of a geek. She has no less than three Amazon Echo devices in her house and uses them to control everything from the TV to her computer. But she loses things all the time. The same is true for her credit card, which she loses almost every week, but eventually finds in her purse or her car.  When she loses it, Jennifer would like a way to tell her Amazon Echo to disable the card for further spending, which would give her time to look around for it without having to call the bank.
    • The Challenge to Solve: Voice-enable Jennifer’s payment account using a intelligent home device like Echo, Google Home, or even Siri.