Financial literacy solutions in the foreground of our hackathon Open Finance

With the Open Finance hackathon, we wanted to contribute to an open financial ecosystem, reshape our industry, and make the financial world a little bit better. We wanted to create an ecosystem or a collaborative network of digital experts from all over Europe, thus attract young talents and students to participate and offer them the opportunity and help at the beginning of their careers. For the first time, companies, fintech and digital startups, were also invited to participate.

We received a many applications: individuals (36), teams (11) and organizations (5) from different countries of Southeast Europe and even from Switzerland and Kenya.

For twenty days, the participants dedicated their knowledge and free time to coding, ideation and discussing the ideas with their teammates and our bank’s experts. During that hackathon, we also organized experts’ meetings and two round tables (Open Finance: “What the future brings for banking and financial services” and “Risks and opportunities of Open Finance”) with destinguished guests – experts from the field of Open banking and finance –, Simon  Steinman (MbillS, Emoney and Payment Sevices), Matic Bitenc (Toshl Finance), Petr Dvorak (CEO Wultra), Tomas Synek (Adastra Group) and Pierre-Alexandre Boulay  (Backbase Ltd) and NLB experts Jiří Truhlář, Nebojša Varoščić and Vito Gosar.

In addition to the business model, the contestants had to prepare a demo or program code of the solution and a 3-minute presentation video with an explanation of the innovative idea. In the end, the participants proposed a variety of solutions, the common thread of which touched and focused mainly on financial literacy. The jury composed of the president of the jury Jiří Truhlář, Antonio Argir, Vito Gosar and Nebojša Varoščić had a difficult job in determining the best concepts and solutions, and finally chose the winners in two categories: in the category Individuals and teams the FinCats Team was ranked first, and in the category Organization INNOCTA GmbH won.