Finastra today announced the first public hackathon on its FusionFabric.cloud open development platform, underpinned by Microsoft Azure. The FusionONE Hackathon will take place over the weekend of May 17-19 in London. Teams from banks, Fintechs, integrators and independent developers are invited to join the event and create innovations grounded in Open Banking. Mentors from Microsoft, Accenture and VC INNOVATIONS (the company behind FinTECHTalents) will be on site to support the participating teams and will be part of the judging panel to select the winners.

Teams will be granted access to Finastra’s Open APIs – providing a window to Finastra’s core solutions, and allowing them to build new capabilities on top of trusted systems already in use at hundreds of banks globally. Using FusionFabric.cloud’s rapid development environment and integrated API management tools, teams are invited to create new solutions in one of five challenges:

• Engagement – apps for the next generation of financial services customers
• Machine learning insights – apps to better serve customer needs
• Data visualization – displaying results, recommendations and learning intuitively
• Inclusion – building a more inclusive financial ecosystem for customers
• Sustainable finance – promoting financial well-being

Once fully tested, successful apps will be made available to banks through Finastra’s FusionStore – an online marketplace for banks to search for and consume applications.

“The FusionONE Hackathon will encourage teams to collaborate and co-innovate in building the next generation of financial applications – with a particular focus on areas that will make a real difference to people’s lives, such as customer engagement, financial inclusion and sustainable finance,” said Eli Rosner, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Finastra. “Running the event over 48 hours reflects how a platform-based approach can accelerate innovation in financial services and allow banks to rapidly deliver new products and services that evolve in line with changing customer needs.”

Eric Boyd, CVP, Azure AI, Microsoft, said, “With initiatives such as Open Banking and PSD2 spurring increased competition and innovation in financial services, this hackathon gives participating teams a fantastic opportunity to showcase their ideas and build prototypes. The use of APIs and cloud platforms is crucial in changing the way banks deploy new applications and engage with a new generation of developers that can help them innovate from the outside-in.”

Gareth Wilson, global Payments lead for Accenture, said, “We are thrilled to be working with Finastra to bring together the industry and ensure technology is at the heart of change in financial services. Open Banking is still at the start of its revolution, and it’s vital we keep building an ecosystem of partners to transform the banking landscape for consumers. We are delighted to be supporting FusionONE and look forward to seeing the next generation of ideas come to life.”

The FusionONE Hackathon is a pre-cursor to the FusionONE open API developer conference, May 21-22 in London – four of the best apps at the hackathon will then pitch live on stage at FusionONE for the crown.

See further information about the #FusionONEhack or the FusionONE conference here https://www.finastra.com/fusionone/hackathon.