Hackathon 2018: Where new Ortec Finance projects are born!
Class of 2018
It’s that time of the year again: The Hackathon! Back in 2016 we organized our very first official Ortec Finance Hackathon. And after two very successful editions, we have organized our third one this year. According to one of the participants this year “We don’t have a better way to pioneer and try out many of the innovative technologies than the hackathon.” So it’s not a surprise that the hackathon has returned for its third edition. It is a great opportunity for people to experiment with new techniques and work on their ideas with total freedom on how to do so, stimulating creativity and the creation of new ideas that can be implemented in the company later on.
The competition
Just like last year, the 2018 Hackathon was open to the entire organization, providing a great opportunity for people of different departments to work together on innovative projects that could possibly be directly related to our clients. On this year’s edition, we had a total of 18 teams competing within three different tracks: climate change, technologies of tomorrow and core innovations. During the hackathon, the teams had a total of 12 hours straight to develop their ideas and get everything ready for their final presentation in front of the three judges, one from each track.
The winners
This year we had, once again, amazing ideas from all the teams that participated. Unfortunately, our judges had to make their decisions and decide on one winner per track. On the climate change track, the winners were SDG Nudges, who wanted investors to be aware of the (social) impact of their investments. Mike Markus explains “We wanted to nudge people into selecting a more sustainable portfolio that contributes to different SDG goals such as climate action, poverty or gender equality, in order to help the world become a better place.”. On the technologies of tomorrow track, Dynamic Feed took the win. Their project involved the design of a solution that focuses on providing the user with relevant information and suggestions regarding our applications, taking into account the ever-changing environment that our clients are inserted. Sven Anker: “Within this platform it would be awesome to have an overview of everything happening within your company, instead of having to check each application separately.” Last, but definitely not least, we have the core innovations track, with OPAL Virtual Advisor as the winner. For their project, they decided to introduce speech navigation and interaction to our OPAL solution. Tim Faase: “As a follow-up of Alexa use with voice control, we wanted to visualize response in the application since Alexa does not have a screen.”
We would like to congratulate, not only the winning teams, but all those that participated in this year’s hackathon. We saw great projects and results during this edition and we can’t wait to see what projects will come to life next year!
