Financial Services Innovators (FSI), a not-for-profit organisation with trustees from the Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigeria Inter-bank Settlement System Plc., Sterling Bank Plc. and the Fintech community will on the 5th and 6th of March 2020, at NG_Hub Yaba Lagos and across more than 50 other locations within Nigeria organise its first Hackathon tagged “PayAsYouKnow”.
At this competition, over 1,000 developers broken into teams of 2 to 5 developers per team will gather to showcase their problem-solving skills and compete for prizes. The distributed Hackathon is organised in collaboration with Google Developer Groups (GDG) in Nigeria – comprising 55 active groups reaching over 40,000 developers across the country. In addition, 47 Developer Student Clubs (DSC) with over 16,000 active student developers in Nigerian tertiary institutions, will be joining their GDG counterparts in activities related to the “PayAsYouKnow” Hackathon.
Teams will take on a problem statement and seek to discover solutions that address payment needs of the informal sector with attention to providing multiple payment options as well as tackling fraud, dispute resolution related issues and financial exclusion.
The Hackathon is in line with their mandate to engender financial innovation, stimulate industry collaboration and accelerate fintech development towards widespread availability and uptake of relevant financial services for a vibrant financial ecosystem.
As you may know, FSI launched the first Fintech Industry Innovation Sandbox on the 9th of December 2019 with 3 BVN related APIs from NIBSS and in less than 3 months, we, together with the Fintech community have recorded the feat below
- Addition of inter-bank transfer and inter-bank name enquiry APIs from Sterling Bank
- Integration of Africa’s Talking APIs -Voice, SMS and USSD
- 3 modules on the Sandbox -Node JS, Java and Python and an SDK to make it easier for young developers to build products with PHP, .Net, etc. in the pipeline
- Union Bank Plc., Wema Bank Plc., Fidelity Bank Plc., Nigeria Identity Management Commission (NIMC) and StanbicIBTC are in the process of deploying APIs.
Hence, we are excited to schedule the Hackathon on the heels of these collaborative achievements and particularly the sandbox which will be the working tool for contestants with the aim of boosting the momentum towards the:
- development of innovative fintech products that will drive financial inclusion and also address the needs of diverse consumers.
- emergence of fintech entrepreneurs and businesses
- stimulation of industry collaboration and integration
We look forward to the exciting products to be built on the Sandbox which will answer the question and do justice to the Hackathon theme “How would you innovate identity & payment systems to prevent fraud and keep people safe with payments?”
We should be able to identify people with any unique identifier anytime and anywhere they transact to engender trust between the parties. Static and dynamic IDs can be unique to consumers anytime they transact. The payment process should be simplified and seamless especially for low-value payments to make it inclusive for everyone. Payment applications should be built in a manner that it can stall transaction fraud ‘on the go’. The effect of Vishing, Smishing and Phishing techniques used by fraudsters should be brought to the barest minimum. Payment transactions should also be cost-effective for every type of consumer? These are some of the burning issues, “PayAsYouKnow” hopes to proffer relevant solutions to.
The Hackathon event will also feature a fireside chat with the Central Bank of Nigeria. In attendance would be Mr Musa Jimoh, the Director of Payments System Management Department. The session will provide an avenue for the regulator to understand the pain points of startups and Fintechs whilst he also shares the strategic focus and thinking of the Central Bank on the topic “Fintech Regulation: The Way Forward”.
Participants would also benefit from the capacity building workshop. This session will focus on ”Protecting your IP Rights”.
To participate at this event and any other event, intended participants should sign up for membership at FSI.ng/join. Membership is free.
