Daily Times

In the run-up to the Momentum Tech Conference, to be held on 30th April and 1st May at the Pearl Continental Hotel in Karachi, Momentum, in collaboration with Copay an initiative of Covalent, will be organizing a Fintech Hackathon.

The aim of the Hackathon is to provide a platform to the developer community in the fintech space to help create new customer experiences and revenue models by leveraging Pakistan’s digital payment ecosystem. Members of the developer community which have registered for the competition will be working on different challenges, including but not limited to, QR payments, voice & SMS based payments, instant card issuance, bulk corporate payments, and multi factor authentication.

The Momentum Tech Conference is a platform bringing together the global technology and business fraternity. Various industry leaders, startups, incubators, accelerators, investors, and other stakeholders will gather under one roof to work on innovative and disruptive technologies. This year’s event will see a host of activities planned, including workshops, a Career Expo, and the much-celebrated Start-up 100 competition, in addition to the Fintech Hackathon. The Conference aims at educating, inspiring, and connecting Pakistani entrepreneurs to the wider startup eco-system.

The Fintech Hackathon will provide an opportunity to the members of the developer community attending to come up with innovative products and services regarding payments, ecommerce, booking, and digital mapping using the Open APIs of Covalent, Eocean, Bank Alfalah, 1LINK, TPL Maps, Avanza premier payment services (apps), Brandverse and UnionPay. More than 100+ APIs will be available for the participating teams to maneuver and extract novel solutions. The whole competition is spread over two days, during which the teams will be briefed about different APIs, following which they will select a few of them to solve the challenges. On the second day, the teams will give prototype demos and presentations, upon which the judges will select the winners.

“This Hackathon is expected to bring enormous benefits to the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the country. Participating teams will have access to open APIs & Payments Eco System on the Cloud as well as a specialized knowledge base and easy-to-understand documentation. Moreover, young and aspiring individuals will get the opportunity to consult with domain experts present on the spot and even after the event,” said Sana Mela, Program Director, Momentum Tech Conference. In addition, there are multiple perks and prizes for the winners, amounting to $10,000 worth of services and products.

According to the Digital Transformation Index of 2018, nearly 65 percent of companies feel positive about their ability to adapt to technological disruption in the next three years. This is an indication that there is great potential for technology disruption ahead of us. Globally, digital key-players like eBay, Google, Twitter, and Amazon rely on APIs for innovation. Pakistan needs to quickly catch up with digital advancements to avoid the risk of falling behind, as it is currently less than 0.1 per cent of the world’s digital economy.