Hackers set to grab the $50,000 prize in Recode Nigeria

Hackers aiming to grab the $50,000 prize in the Recode Nigeria initiative by the Africa Fintech Foundry (AFF) should be warming up to achieve that feat in the next 24 hours.

This would herald a three-day hackathon slated for 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.

AFF spokesperson, Victor Okigbo, said that the banking industry needs to enhance its existing customer experience, adding that “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.”

Okigbo also said that during the hackathon, 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,” Sarkar said.

However, upon completion of the contest, Okigbo gave an assurance that a team at the hackathon would be accepted into the 17-week AFF accelerator programme with up to $50,000 seed investment. He added that the winning teams will get up to N3million-prize money, one-year’s access to IBM’s Bluemix and Microsoft Azure platforms.

While explaining the IBM Bluemix cloud service, IBM’s spokesperson, Akintomide Akingbade, said the service supports several programming languages and services to build, run, and manage applications on the cloud. “We are backing the startups at Recode Nigeria hackathon with the latest cloud offering from IBM. With this partnership, we are enabling the software geniuses create and manage their mobile and web applications on the cloud”.