Projects by students of the IT University got awards at the past hackathon devoted to fintech-projects.
Innopolis University held a two-day hackathon in the framework of InspiRussia, a fintech accelerator that will be launched by Life.SREDA Venture Fund, a partner of the IT-University, in late September. The event was focused on: payment bots, financial and blockchain technologies that enable making bank transactions with no middlemen involved, communicating by means of bots, and developing trading platforms outside the marketplace, etc.
In total, it was submitted 500 applications, including 300 on-site participants. A list of attendees included developers from Russia, China, Israel, the United States and Ukraine, age of participants ranged from 7 to 53 years. The event was supervised by experts of the fintech industry: Mike Goldin, Astrid Hackenberg, Konstantin Goldstein — Microsoft; Ilshat Fardiev, Tatfondbank; Stepan Kashintsev — iSimpleLab, Simon Taylor — Barclays Plc.; Alexander Chepurnoy — Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK); Grigory Petrov— Voximplant and others.
At the hackathon finals the teams presented 29 projects developed within 24 hours. 12 projects were marked by the jury. Projects delivered by students of Innopolis University were among the winners.
Emil Sharifullin and Kirill Bedraty offered a cash back solution which is a bonus for using a credit card. "When I realized that the cash back system motivates me to pay by a credit card more frequently I started thinking of designing a platform that allows any entities aside from banks and stores to reward clients for using certain services", - shared Emil Sharifullin, a developer of FinFair bot.
Students presented to the jury a service based on a Telegram bot, and illustrated how it works using an example of bonus exchange in Minecraft when a user pays for diamonds with a credit card. Representatives of Tatfondbank and iSimpleLab, a company developing an RBS platform, got interested in the project. The team received a 40,000 Rub. cash prize and a hard drive as a reward. "We hope that cooperation with these companies will help us to make this project real in the near future," - added a student of the IT University.
The Q Solution team has also joined the list of winners who received money prizes from the bank. Ivan Nikitin, Gael Geda and Farrukh Kholmukhamedov developed a mobile application to pay for household utilities and gas supply in a few clicks using bar code. Gael Geda explained the operating principle of the application: "First, the user enters his/her personal account and chooses a service to pay for. Then he/she scans a bar code marked on a receipt and selects the account to withdraw money for the payment".
Students admitted that the task was not difficult. During studies at the University the young people acquired skills and knowledge allowing them to develop such a complex project. "At the presentation we saw a couple of similar applications, but, apparently, our solution was better," - noticed Gael.
The second prize-winning project designed by the team was a Telegram bot for banking operations. The bot provides information on exchange rates, special offers, locations of the nearest bank offices and ATMs, and in future its users will be able to use personal accounts. "Both ideas were inspired by case studies offered by the bank. Once we started working on one case we realized that we can implement both", - said Farrukh Kholmukhamedov, another member of the team.
The student noticed that the projects need certain updates. "Speaking of the application, it has to be more market-ready and saleable. So far it looks quite simple, because product design is a low-priority task at hackathons. To run the Telegram bot at the hackathon we needed a server and we used the one of my own. However, the bot shall be relocated to enable proper operation.
WeNeedXBox, a team of Anton Trantin, a graduate of Innopolis University, received a gaming console as a gift from Microsoft for development of a system for quick and secure processing of international documents. "Our project is based on blockchain technology and it will help to avoid paperwork when making multilateral international transactions by means of data transfer to a secure and high-speed environment and a notary certification service," - said Anton.
According to the developer, the rest teams have designed electronic wallets and other payment services, that is why his project is unique despite the fact that it offers a solution to a classic problem. At the hackathon there were several companies that got interested in this service and their representatives exchanged contact information with programmers. "We developed a basic concept and proved feasibility of the idea. Having a good team and support of an industrial partner we can build a properly functioning basic software and hardware of the system for 3-4 months", - added the graduate.
The list of winners included the following projects: Tip & Go, a mobile service for tipping by means of a QR-code in cryptocurrency or rubles; #schoolteam, an interactive map with discounts and special offers for banking; DigitalDentistry.Exchange, a cloud service for multilateral contracts helping to save time and money; Buydentity, a service that monitors and visualizes the entire life-cycle of a product using blockchain technology for each of the participants involved in the process; Technocracy/InspiRussia BlockChain Voting System, a voting service based on blockchain technology; UniversalWallet, a mobile ethereum wallet helping to monitor user’s account and use it as a unique person identification service to facilitate entry of personal data when shopping on various web sites; ByByBank_bot, a market place bot creating smart blockchain ethereum contracts in Azure cloud.
The WhiteMoney project, a payment system for legal entities based on distributed blockchain network, has become the winner of the hackathon. The team won a paid trip to InspireASIA, a Singapore accelerator that serves as a foundation for InspiRussia accelerator.
