Two Finovate alums took home top honors at the UniCredit Appathon event this week. SBDA Group won first place for its Smartbanking app that uses transaction data to help users budget and manage their finances. Coming in second was Irish authentication specialist Sedicii, whose technology enables customers to authenticate themselves to a network or service without having to share a password or other personal information.
The goal of the Appathon is to stimulate innovation “both within and beyond the bank” said Paolo Fiorentino, UniCredit Deputy General Manager. Indeed, the first place prize of the hackathon is the chance to work with a team from UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions (an opportunity valued at €50,000). The second place prize was a pair of tickets to FinovateLondon 2017 (an awesome award, in our humble opinion), and the third place winner, Rome’s All Industries, won a virtual reality headset for its digital financial assistant, TalkForce.
Now in its third year and conducted 100% online for the first time, UniCredit’s fintech hackathon featured more than 190 teams across Europe. The event was judged by senior managers from both UniCredit and its subsidiary, UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions. Teams were asked to demonstrate a solution in one of three categories: digital payments, digital wallets, and” instantaneous delivery of complex information using big-data analytics.” 70 cities from 26 European countries were represented, with most of the team (32) coming from Italy. Also participating were 10 “international” teams. The judges evaluated each solution on the basis of technology, completeness, innovation, feasibility, subject matter, and API relevance.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in London, SBDA Group demonstrated its SBDA Customer Insight solution at FinovateEurope 2016. The company’s solutions include Sberbank Messenger, demonstrated at FinovateSpring 2016 by Russia’s Sberbank and mobile banking app, Sense, demonstrated at FinovateFall 2015 by Alfa Banking Group. Check out our Finovate debut profile of SBDA Group from earlier this year.
A finalist in the Innotribe Startup Challenge and one of five Finovate alums to be included among the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Technology Pioneers, Sedicii’s authentication service can be used instead of one-time passwords, as well as deployed in a tele-service environment, and is effective against man-in-the-browser, man-in-the-middle, and server-side attacks. The company demonstrated its authentication platform at FinovateEurope 2015.