Boosting innovation within the team: the first-ever internal hackathon
On March 9th, LUXHUB employees gathered to take part in the first-ever internal hackathon organized within the walls of the Open Finance pioneer. From pizzas and drinks to conscious shopping and how to “kill bills”, the first session turned out to be as funny as insightful.
As explained right from the start by hackathon organizer Ramzi Dziri (Head of Product), the goal of this session was to “bring OPEN BANKING SERVICES in the most TRANSPARENT & EFFORTLESS way possible to EVERY USER!”
In other words, participating teams had to spend several hours building on mock-ups and working proof of concepts destined to provide users one of the several possible Open Banking services, with little integration effort from a potential client.
To do so, they could:
- Leverage any of the ONE capabilities: payment initiation, access to account information, or any related service (such as reporting or onboarding, etc.
- The service could be integrated in an online page or native app or else as widget, SDK, browser extension, etc.
- Finally, target users of the service could be either end-consumers or companies.
Hackathon winners & happy employees
After several hours of idea-crafting and PowerPoint editing, as well as a final pitching session and the jury deliberation, the different prizes were awarded.
- “Lëtz Cook”, composed of Amaia (Junior Legal Counsel), Christophe (Senior Full Stack Developer) and Florian (external contractor), won the TECH4GOOD AWARD. Their projects consisted in a solution destined to local producers, providing them with a new way to show their products and streamline the process shopping. It therefore combined “conscious shopping”, a smooth payment flow and a sustainability angle!
- Aurélien (Product Manager), Marco (Governance & Organization) and Skander (external contractor), won the WOW! AWARD. This SaaS solution aims at making expenses easy! With it, employees would be able to connect their bank account(s) directly within an app and select relevant expenses to declare. After adding attachments and submitting them to the accounting department for review, a MULTILINE XML file is generated so the reimbursement can be directly initiated.
- Giuseppe (external contractor), Patrice (Full Stack Developer), Valérie (HR & Finance) and Xavier (Service Delivery & Operations Manager), aka “KillBills”, won the DATA WIZARD AWARD. Their project aims at helping users monitor their earnings, spendings and savings. By giving consent (valid for 3 months), users enable the solution to directly retrieve monthly transactions via their bank’s PSD2 connectivity. It then provides hints on how to save money for each specific category.
- “The LUXHUB 2” team, composed of the duo Raoul (Lead Architect) and Guillaume (Site Reliability Engineer), snapped the MOONSHOT AWARD. Their impressive working prototype app built on top of Zapier platform aimed to bring low-code workflows to any user no matter their IT proficiency. Practical use of these could be generating a payment request automatically when a new Salesforce record is created or a new email received.