Holvi @ Junction 2017 — Disrupting the Fintech environment
We’ve participated in many hackathons — it’s time to give something back!
Holvi is participating in Junction, but this time not in the crowd — well, in the crowd, but not hacking. We are sponsoring the FinTech track with the theme “Disrupting the Fintech Environment!”
So, how did we come to this topic, and what can you do about it?
1 — Freedom to hack
Having participated in many hackathons, we know that it’s sometimes frustrating to be bound to one API, one service or one restricted topic.
When thinking about the challenge, freedom had to be a key factor! We had to allow people to be creative and go outside one API, technology or sandbox.
This is why we are not making this challenge around our own API. We are providing a platform for you to deploy your services, if you need it.
You’ll have the complete and absolute freedom to use the technologies you like the most!
2 — The Fintech ecosystem is BIG!
When people think fintech, they usually associate it with moving or managing money. In fact, Fintech is a vast space of small services that have to work together. All of those pieces can and should be hacked! Let’s look at Holvi, for example:
Identity verification
It would be nice if people could just go to a bank and open a bank account in 10 minutes. But that’s not how it usually goes. Scheduling bank appointments, wait multiple days, providing Identity documents, answering boring questions…
These procedures exist because there’s plenty of bad people around — fraudsters, attempting to steal and scam other people, criminals attempting to “clean” money from criminal activities. At Holvi we’re trying the hardest to reduce the amount of time required to open a bank account to the minimum possible, while not compromising security!
But there’s a lot to be done. Processes still rely on people, and with recent developments in AI, deep learning and computer vision, verifying your identity and validating copies of documents is becoming a possibility. What else would you do?
- Do you think emotion detection would allow fraud detection during customer identity verification?
- Do you think you can verify someone’s identity using the Blockchain?
Money and ledger technologies
There’s this new technology that you might have heard about… It’s called the Blockchain.
The blockchain is a new solution for an old problem: keeping record of account balances even when some participants don’t always agree with each other. It has been a key role of banks to keep these balance sheets, communicating to other banks the amount transferred between them.
But how can you make that communication faster and more trustworthy? How can you make banks agree on these transactions, even when the currencies fluctuate in value?
Fraud management
Yes, not everyone makes their living in an ethical way.
Using stolen credit cards, phishing for credentials, tricking people into false online stores, selling non-existent products or sending false invoices — the list goes on and on, and we try hard to protect people from these attacks. We do our best, but it’s hard, and we’re vastly outnumbered.
We need your help! Machine learning has fuelled a lot of anti-fraud technologies, but these are mostly targeted at events that cause losses to banks and financial services. There’s still plenty of work in securing people’s money from less well intended people.
How would you protect people agains fake invoices or fake online stores? How can you create a mechanism of trust on the web? How are technologies like Ethereum and other smart contract technologies changing the way trust works?
Recommendation and prediction systems
If you have an umbrella business, wouldn’t it be great if your business account warned you of an especially dry autumn? Or if you have a restaurant, wouldn’t you like to be notified of new competition or a big event coming to town?
A business account can be more than just managing money. It can be about managing your business, from end-to-end, providing advice on managing your money, increasing your profits and reducing unnecessary costs.
What about personal accounts? Getting advice on how to better manage your expenses? Suggesting cheaper alternatives to services? Recommending investment opportunities? Telling you in advance if you’re running out of money? :)
Automate the boring, repetitive tasks
We have gotten used to a lot of repetitive and tedious tasks in our daily lives. And business owners are very familiar with these — storing and filing receipts, keeping track of the taxes to pay, categorising expenses, closing the month and the year…
We are working to automate these tasks, but we’re barely scratching the surface.
We want people to take any of these topics and hack away. Just come talk to us and we’ll help you get on your way!
What can you use to make amazing things?
There’s a lot happening, and some technologies are still underused in the mainstream! These have the potential to completely change the way banks and financial systems work. Look at these:
PSD2 (Europe-specific)
It stands for “Payment Service Directive 2”, and it means that by 2018 all banks will have an API to access their data. This is what it means:
1 — It will allow services to connect to bank accounts and retrieve information from them. For example, a service could access your bank account to recommend investment products by analysing your financial life! Or give you savings advice.
2 — It will allow services to connect to the bank account and create payments. This enables automation of transactions and decouple the usual netbanking services from the banks themselves. You can create and provide a bank UI without being a bank!
Smart Contracts
A lot has been written about decentralised currencies. But Smart Contracts can be the next big thing. Ethereum, for example, allows you to run code on the blockchain—code that cannot be manipulated or stopped.
For example, you can code a contract that only releases the money of a transaction if the transaction is proven to be successful. Or, one that will donate 10 euro to a charity every time you don’t check in at the gym.
Artificial intelligence (text and image)
A lot of enterprise processes still rely on paper, vision and hearing: receipts, identity documents, face-to-face meetings.
Artificial intelligence is set to automate and speed up multiple processes that are still made by hand today.
The Challenge Prizes
1st Prize — Most Ready for Reality!
We want to be creative, but we’re also keeping it real! That’s why we’re giving our first prize to a solution (as small as it might be) to the most ready for reality. We are hoping that the prize will help in the next steps of the project. We would love to see you in 10 years on the cover of Forbes magazine!
2nd Prize — Most Disruptive!
Your idea might not yet be fully formed, but the project shows a lot of potential… You just need a push to get it to work, maybe one more hackathon, or 3… But if you win this prize we believe you’re onto something…
3rd Prize — Most Technically Awesome !
Never mind the usefulness. Did you just launch a satellite as a blockchain node? Did you use deep learning to authenticate your bank account with burping sounds? You deserve this prize for the pure technology awesomeness!
Now it’s up to you! Happy Hacking!
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