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Get ready to think, code and innovate!

As a part of the ongoing Fintech Open Month, Niti Aayog in association with PhonePe, hosts its first-ever open-to-all event for ideating and coming up with the most creative solutions for the FinTech space. It’s time for innovators, digital creators and developers from all over India to think, ideate and code!

Hackathons certainly offer some clear advantages as compared to traditional innovation processes. Apart from being agile and inclusive, hackathons also promote multidisciplinary collaboration and shorter, quicker cycles of innovation that further solve rapidly changing consumer needs.

Purpose of the FinTech Open Hackathon

The Hackathon will help the develop community build on the PhonePe Pulse data along with other open-data APIs and frameworks such as Account Aggregator to power the following:

1. Develop alternate risk models for Lending, Investment and Insurance with the focus being on financial inclusion.
2. Innovate ingenious products that use the power data signals for multiple demographics and geographics, for broader adoption of financial services.
3. Improved visualization and derived intelligence based on Digital Payments data.

Participants will be expected to have incorporated at least one of the above-mentioned features in the final application that they develop.

Listed below are a few examples that can accelerate the participation of the population in the financial services sector.

1. Personal Expense Management with Demographic benchmarks
2. Alternate data to augment traditional lending signals for better underwriting.
3. Goal-based investment advisory based on automated risk-reward profiling.
4. Improved claims processing by automated filtering of potential fraudulent claims.
5. Personalization and gamification of incentives through intelligent recommendation engines based on payment behavioral data.
6. Contextual, personalized education on financial products, across multiple languages.
7. Customized investment products based on personal risk profile and preferences
8. Enabling users to better understand their risk tolerance.
9. User fee based wealth & investment management to remove biases from advisory.
10. Enabling a purely digital experience for a user, across their investment lifecycle which includes onboarding, nomination, investment, redemption, etc.)
11. Making insurance claims processes transparent and thoroughly digital.

Platforms to use

Participants can use the following sources of Open Data. Please note that you are open to access any other open data platforms that you are aware of. This is not a comprehensive list.

Participants can use the following Sandbox platforms to develop their hacks

By the end of the event, participants will be required to present a working prototype of their hack to the judges, post which each hack will be judged based on certain parameters. While the judges consider the hacks, they might ask for additional information on the prototypes.

Criteria of judging

All hacks will be judged based on the following criteria

• Complexity of the problem. Bonus points will be awarded to the hack that has solved the most difficult problem successfully!
• Impact of the hack. Larger the impact created by the hack, better will be the points awarded thereafter.
• Innovative uniqueness or USP. Additional or bonus points will be awarded if the hack tries to address a unique problem or a problem that has not been addressed previously.
• Completeness of the solution and presentation. Lastly, more points will be awarded for the completeness of the solution and to how well the hack is demonstrated in the final stage.

How does it work?

Teams can have one 1 (solo) to 5 participants. Teams will be required to submit a working prototype of their application along with a 5-minute demonstration video of the same.

Prizes

There will be exciting prizes for the winners of the Hackathon event!

The top 5 hacks will be awarded a prize money in the following denominations:

• 1st place : INR 1,50,000 for the team (one prize)
• 2nd place: INR 1,00,000 for the team (two prizes)
• 3rd place: INR75,000 for the team (two prizes)

Judges may decide to award fewer or more prizes depending on the hacks submitted.

FAQs

1. Who can participate?

This hackathon is open to all residents of India. You can be a student or a working professional. All hacks will be judged at the same level.

2. Can we participate as teams?

Yes. Folks can participate individually or in teams of upto 5 members. Judging criteria and prize money remains the same irrespective of the number of teammates.

3. Is there a deadline to register?

All teams that intend to participate, need to register themselves before 11:59 PM on 23rd February, 2022.

4. How long will the event last?

You can start working on the Hackathon at any time. The deadline to submit your entries is 12:00 noon, 25th February, 2022.

4. What is the cost of participation?

Participation is completely free of cost.

5. With whom will the IP of the projects be developed in the Hackathon reside?

IP of the projects developed in the hackathon will reside with the creators of the project.

6. Where can I get help on the sandbox, apis and data sources?

We will have a LIVE AMA on Monday, 21st Feb, 2022 at 4:00 PM. If you have any questions, be sure to tune in to this session.

7. Where can we reach out if we have further questions?

If you are still unsure about anything, you can reach out to hello@devfolio.co.