ICICI Bank announced the winners of ‘ICICI Appathon 2017’, the second season of its mobile app development challenge. The ‘Grand Finale’ of the ICICI Appathon 2017 saw Rupam Das from Bengaluru; Bayesian Conspiracy, also from Bengaluru and Headfitted Solutions from Pune take home the top honours for developing the next generation mobile applications.
The eminent jury chose the top three winners from over 3,400 participants including a large number of entries from international developers and startups. The winning entries will get the opportunity to collaborate with the Bank.
The jury comprised Anup Bagchi, Executive director, ICICI Bank; B. Madhivanan, chief technology and digital officer, ICICI Bank; Chetan Naik, VP, Enterprise & Mid-Market, IBM India & South Asia; Pankaj Gianani, head of India Banking, TCS; Rajashekara .V. Maiya, associate VP and head, Product Strategy, Infosys Finacle, and Sandeep Singhal, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners.
The first winning application focused on enabling term insurance eligibility checks based on a medical underwriting application. The other winning solutions emphasised on offering banking services based on voice commands as well as making offline payments using dynamic QR codes, respectively.
Anup Bagchi said: “We at ICICI Bank continue to put customers at the centre of everything we do. We continue to partner with a wider ecosystem to imagine, ideate and execute things which interest our customers and add value to them. In line with this vision, we conducted ICICI Appathon last year which was the country’s first virtual app development challenge.
"The programme enabled us to tap into the minds of talented technopreneurs as well as developers globally and helped us cater our customers better. The winning entry from last year was incorporated into the Bank’s mobile banking application and launched as ‘iMobile SmartKeys’, Asia’s first payments app using digital keyboards.
"We are extremely happy to note that this year too, ICICI Appathon has seen significant participation from across the globe. We have got some interesting ideas which we believe will enable development of breakthrough solutions, making mobile banking simpler than ever before.
"We will continue to promote innovation in every aspect of our business and ICICI Appathon will continue to evolve as a perfect platform for the young and creative minds to come together and showcase their innovations.”
All participants were judged on five criteria: uniqueness of the proposition, functionality, business potential, user experience and scalability. The top three winners will get the following rewards:
* Total prize money of over Rs 22.5 lakh from ICICI Bank, Infosys Finacle and TCS.
* A potential engagement opportunity with ICICI Bank.
* US$ 20,000 worth of ‘Google Cloud Credits’ for further development of their products.
* They will be able to fast track their entries to the '10,000 Startups' programme of NASSCOM, if they apply for it.
* Two members of the winning team will receive access to the network and co-working community of 91springboard, which is a community of freelancers, startups and small to large businesses, for the next three months.
* They will also get an opportunity to present their ideas to the executive team of Envestnet|Yodlee at their flagship event – GarageFest 2017.
The top three winners have received gift vouchers worth Rs. 25,000 each from Envestnet|Yodlee, cloud based digital financial platform. Further, the top 10 finalists will receive US$ 1,000 worth of AWS Activate promotional credits for 12 months.
One of the 10 finalists will also have the opportunity to co-develop a proof of concept with Infosys Finacle and will be able to showcase it at the Infosys Confluence at San Francisco.
As ‘ICICI Appathon’ was available virtually on the cloud to a developer anywhere. Over 3,400 participants took part in it from across the globe. In India, over 1500 of the entries came from non-metro cities like Vellore, Noida, Gurugram, Jaipur, Coimbatore, Bhubaneswar and Jalandhar among others. It has witnessed significant participation from women developers with close to 400 of entries from them.
Hosted on the IBM Cloud based platform, ICICI Appathon offered a diverse set of over 250 APIs (Application Programme Interface), the largest set of Banking and Financial sector APIs in any Indian software development event.
The APIs were from ICICI Bank and its group companies namely ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, ICICI Lombard General Insurance and ICICI Securities. As a first, payment APIs from 'Visa', the 'Unified Payment Interface' API from NPCI and ‘data analytics’ from Envestnet|Yodlee were also available for the app development challenge. Participants had to create innovative working prototypes of mobile applications using these APIs.
