Accelerator offers $50, 000 prize money in hackathon competition

Africa Fintech Foundry (AFF), a fintech accelerator, is organizing a 48-hour hackathon titled ‘Recode Nigeria’, which comes with up to $50,000 prize. It has the support of industry giants such as Microsoft, IBM, Access Bank, and Idea Nigeria.

Holding on March 24-26, the programme attracts multiple teams of talented developers, designers, problem-solvers, and out-of-the-box thinkers to build brilliant solutions to the most vexing problems in financial services.

According to AFF spokesperson, Victor Okigbo, the banking industry needs to enhance its existing customer experience. “The mission of these participants is to transform the mode of customer engagement, enhance the customer experience and create solutions that bring value to banking customers”.

During the hackathon, he said, participating teams would have the privilege of creating excellent solutions that combine API’s from one of Nigeria’s leading financial institutions, IBM’s Bluemix platform, Microsoft Azure amongst others.

Executive Director, Commercial Banking, Access Bank, Roosevelt Ogbonna, said the bank is collaborating with the AFF to “ensure that shareholders value and growth in tomorrow’s complex financial technology ecosystem can be delivered. By supporting initiatives like Recode Nigeria hackathon, we have teamed up with technology titans like Microsoft, IBM and other numerous technology startups to create the future together.”

Enumerating what the participants derive from using its latest platforms, Microsoft spokesperson, Dona Sarkar in an interview with Accelerate tv, said as a cloud-computing infrastructure for building and managing applications through a global network, “Microsoft Azure offers startups the opportunity to host their applications in the cloud. As such, they will not purchase or manage their own servers. That is why the winner gets access to the Azure platform.”