FinTech: AFF Doles Out $50,000 for 48-Hour Hackathon

Africa Fintech Foundry [AFF], a fintech accelerator, is organizing a 48-hour hackathon titled Recode Nigeria, which comes with up to a $50,000 prize.

It has the support of industry giants such as Microsoft, IBM, Access Bank, and Idea Nigeria.

Holding on March 24-26, the programme attracts multiple teams of talented developers, designers, problem-solvers, and out-of-the-box thinkers to build brilliant solutions to the most vexing problems in financial services.

According to AFF spokesperson, Victor Okigbo, the banking industry needs to enhance its existing customer experience. “The mission of these participants is to transform the mode of customer engagement, enhance the customer experience and create solutions that bring value to banking customers”.

During the hackathon, he said, participating teams would have the privilege of creating excellent solutions that combine API’s from one of Nigeria’s leading financial institutions, IBM’s Bluemix platform, Microsoft Azure amongst others.

Roosevelt Ogbonna, executive director of Commercial Banking- Access Bank, said the bank is collaborating with the AFF to “ensure that shareholders value and growth in tomorrow’s complex financial technology ecosystem can be delivered. By supporting initiatives like Recode Nigeria hackathon, we have teamed up with technology titans like Microsoft, IBM and other numerous technology startups to create the future together.”

Enumerating what the participants derive from using its latest platforms, Microsoft spokesperson Dona Sarkar, said that as a cloud-computing infrastructure for building, deploying and managing applications through a global network, “Microsoft Azure offers the startups the opportunity to host their applications in the cloud. As such, they don’t need to purchase or manage their own servers. That is why the winner will get access to the Azure platform.”

However, upon completion of the contest, Okigbo gave an assurance that a team at the hackathon would be accepted into the 17-week AFF accelerator programme with up to $50,000 seed investment. He added that the winning teams will get up to N3million-prize money, one-year's access to IBM’s Bluemix and Microsoft Azure platforms.

While explaining the IBM Bluemix cloud service, IBM’s spokesperson Akintomide Akingbade, said the service supports several programming languages and services to build, run, and manage applications on the cloud. “We are backing the startups at Recode Nigeria hackathon with the latest cloud offering from IBM. With this partnership, we are enabling the software geniuses create and manage their mobile and web applications on the cloud”.

Individuals and teams can register at www.recodenigeria.com. The number allowed in a team, Okigbo said, is a minimum of two and a maximum of five persons. Participants care free to register as individuals or with a team.

Industry leaders and representatives are among the judges that will select the winners of the Recode Nigeria hackathon. Each submission will be scored based on certain criteria with the final score being the average of all scores.

The judges include Victor Etuokwu, Ernest Ndukwe, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Joseph Sam.

Other supporting organizations are Emaginations, Re:write, Trium, Systemic Logics, Accelerate TV, ntel, Dev Center and Design Institute.