There’s more than $85,000 in prizes at stake, including a Grand Prize valued at $73,000, in the Advanced Technology Development Center’s “FinTech Hack @ATDC” competition.
An initiative of ATDC, Worldpay US, Yodlee, and NCR, the FinTech Hack aims to help entrepreneurs, developers, and designers take their ideas to the next level by providing the critical post-hack engagement, mentoring, and support to build viable startup companies.
Participants (REGISTER HERE) will decide which ideas to work on using the APIs of our sponsors. They can work on challenges presented to them by Worldpay US, Yodlee, and NCR — as outlined below — or their own projects. Moreover, we very much encourage ideas to combine and mash up all the sponsors’ APIs, but you can use just one sponsor’s APIs if you want.
Here are the sponsors’ challenges:
Worldpay US APIs and Challenges:
http://apidocs.securenet.com/docs/getstarted.html
Challenge No. 1
- Personalization: The shopping experience is often a cookie-cutter experience. We would love for the experience to be tailored for a customer. Think of Starbucks where they know your name and your drink just by recognizing your face. No user work is involved. How could you use the combination of the three different APIs to create a more personalized user experience with little or no burden on the customer?
Challenge No. 2
- Resolving Issues: No one likes going to the returns department or to customer service to try and correct a mistake. Is there a way you could use the three API sets to put less of a burden on a customer who has to go through these currently challenging processes?
Challenge No. 3
- Helping Merchants Compete: Merchants would love information that could help them capture a customer from a competitor. While they are in the store, is there a way you could use the checkout APIs from Worldpay and the data set from Yodlee to identify prime customers to target with very special incentives at the point of sale?
Challenge No. 4
- Shop OmniChannel: Customers are constantly on the go. One of the challenges in the retail space is how to allow the buying process to transcend whatever device you started with and try to find a way to go from thinking about something via one portal , to buying it in another and possibly returning through yet a different channel. How can the APIs be used to facilitate an amazing experience that you would like?
Yodlee Interactive APIs & Challenges:
https://developer.yodlee.com/Hackathons/Georgia_Hackathon
https://developer.yodlee.com/Simplified_API
https://devnow.yodlee.com/apidocs/index.html
(Please reach out to the Yodlee team for Sandbox environment access.)
Challenge No. 5
- Secure Vault/Help Merchants Compete: Customers would like to pay with their credit cards. But sometimes they forget to bring them. Utilize the APIs to create a payment plan that does not need cards but uses transaction data to create loyalty rewards. Or build an algorithm that can scan through a customer’s transactions. Find the most frequently used merchant and offer incentives for frequent visits, purchases, and sharing information about that merchant.
Challenge No. 6
- Fraud Detection: Security risk and fraud detection are an increasing concern for consumers. Customers sometimes have unauthorized charges on their accounts and they do not have time to track each individual account. How can you go about informing the customer of unauthorized transactions as well as creating algorithm to determine the real security risks are using the APIs.
Challenge No. 7
- Financial Education: Influx of Payment Options…What to Choose?: Many customers have more than one credit card. Some credit cards offer mileage rewards while others have a lower interest rate. How can customers determine which credit card to use for their upcoming purchases in order to maximize the rewards capability of each of the cards and choose the lowest interest rates? Simplify the balancing act. Utilize multiple APIs to receive transaction data, provide information on what bills to pay first, and what stores to frequent for increased rewards/discounts. Users can sync financial information through APIs to receive information via push notifications, set limits on budgets, and begin to understand which bills are most important to pay first.
NCR Challenges APIs and Challenges:
https://silverstagingapi.ncrsmblab.com/docs/apibestpractices.pdf
https://silverstagingapi.ncrsmblab.com/docs/apireference.pdf
Challenge No. 8
- Simplified Sales Location: Although systems like NCR Silver are designed to be mobile, the POS device located in the physical store may be too complex for alternate selling locations. For example, a merchant may want to sell at trade show or special event, but keep their standard POS completely installed in their physical location. They would still want to be able to sell and accept payment at the remote location but avoid the hassle of tearing down their current hardware.
Challenge No. 9
- Employee Monitoring: There are many times when a business owner or store manager is not present in their store at all times. Due to the nature of the business of many Silver merchants, the owner is usually concerned about employee fraud and time and attendance. Create a method for them to be able to accomplish this without having access to the Silver web ui.
Here are the sponsors’ tutorials:
- Worldpay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKa5cWiaD3g
- NCR: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l8cr9ctwdulurnw/NCRFintechHack2015.mp4?dl=0
- Yodlee Interactive: http://ow.ly/UiRnY