ICICI Bank announces winners of ‘ICICI Appathon 2017’

 

  • The contest offered over 250 diverse APIs on the cloud for prototype development, the largest in any software development challenge in India
  • It received an overwhelming response from 3,400 participants from across the globe
  • More than 44% of entries from India were from non-metro cities

Mumbai: ICICI Bank today announced the winners of ‘ICICI Appathon 2017’, the second season of its mobile app development challenge. The ‘Grand Finale’ of the ICICI Appathon 2017 saw Rupam Das from Bengaluru; Bayesian Conspiracy, also from Bengaluru and Headfitted Solutions from Pune take home the top honours for developing the next generation mobile applications. The eminent jury chose the top three winners from over 3,400 participants including a large number of entries from international developers and startups. The winning entries will get the opportunity to collaborate with the Bank.

The jury comprised Mr. Anup Bagchi, Executive Director, ICICI Bank;  Mr. B. Madhivanan, Chief Technology & Digital Officer,  ICICI Bank; Mr. Chetan Naik, Vice President – Enterprise & Mid-Market, IBM India & South Asia; Mr. Pankaj Gianani, Head of India Banking, TCS; Mr. Rajashekara .V. Maiya, Associate Vice President and Head- Product Strategy, Infosys Finacle & Mr. Sandeep Singhal, Co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners.

The first winning application focused on enabling term insurance eligibility checks based on a medical underwriting application. The other winning solutions emphasised on offering banking services based on voice commands as well as making offline payments using dynamic QR codes, respectively.

   

Mr. Anup Bagchi, Executive Director, ICICI Bank said, “We at ICICI Bank continue to put customers at the centre of everything we do. We continue to partner with a wider ecosystem to imagine, ideate and execute things which interest our customers and add value to them. In line with this vision, we conducted ICICI Appathon last year which was the country’s first virtual app development challenge. The programme enabled us to tap into the minds of talented technopreneurs as well as developers globally and helped us cater our customers better. The winning entry from last year was incorporated into the Bank’s mobile banking application and launched as ‘iMobile SmartKeys’, Asia’s first payments app using digital keyboards. We are extremely happy to note that this year too, ICICI Appathon has seen significant participation from across the globe. We have got some interesting ideas which we believe will enable development of breakthrough solutions, making mobile banking simpler than ever before. We will continue to promote innovation in every aspect of our business and ICICI Appathon will continue to evolve as a perfect platform for the young and creative minds to come together and showcase their innovations.”

Said jury member, Mr. Chetan Naik, Vice President – Sales, IBM India/South Asia, “We are excited to see the kind of innovation that has come up from the ICICI Appathon. IBM Cloud offers developers a gamut of services which helps them quickly- build, test, deploy, run and manage applications on the cloud. Our partnership with ICICI is to help them deliver unique experiences to its clients in the fast evolving digital era. Together, through the Appathon we are providing a platform to developers, students, and technology enthusiasts to deliver next-gen banking applications like cashless payments, voice-based banking, IoT-based models etc to make the services of ICICI truly digital keeping in mind the changing requirements of customers.”

Mr. Rajashekara .V. Maiya, Associate Vice President and Head- Product Strategy, Infosys Finacle, “ICICI Bank, our long standing client, has been a pioneer in embracing the truly digital banking paradigm. One of the cornerstones of this new way of banking is to create a thriving innovation ecosystem around the bank’s APIs. Infosys Finacle is committed to work with banks, start-ups and independent developers to help next generation banking experiences evolve through such collaborative platforms. Together, we look to create new products and an experience to keep pace with customer’s accelerating digital lives and help emerging start-ups gain scale with our global presence.”

 

Mr. Pankaj Gianani, Country Head – Banking, India Sales, Tata Consultancy Services, “The banking sector is witnessing a rapid change in the business, technology and regulatory environment, more now than ever before. Ideas, either addressing or taking advantage of this dramatic change, are being born anytime and anywhere. The ICICI Bank Appathon has been a great platform to tap this universe of ideas and convert them into innovative solutions. TCS is proud to partner with ICICI Bank for this Appathon. We congratulate the ICICI Bank team for the great success again this year! “

 

Mr. Sandeep Singhal, Co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners, “It is great to see ICICI Bank promoting entrepreneurial initiatives in the financial technologies space to align with the overall thrust by the government on digital financial infrastructure across banking, payments and financial inclusion. Innovation at the grassroots level promotes new use cases through improved access and lower cost. As the leading private bank, ICICI Bank can help bring these ideas to market and drive widespread adoption.”

All participants were judged on five criteria: uniqueness of the proposition, functionality, business potential, user experience and scalability. The top three winners will get the following rewards:

  • Total prize money of over Rs 22.5 lakh from ICICI Bank, Infosys Finacle and TCS.
  • A potential engagement opportunity with ICICI Bank.
  • USD 20,000 worth of ‘Google Cloud Credits’ for further development of their products.
  • They will be able to fast track their entries to the ‘10,000 Startups’ programme of      NASSCOM, if they apply for it.
  • Two members of the winning team will receive access to the network and co-working community of 91springboard, which is a community of freelancers, startups and small to large businesses, for the next three months.
  • They will also get an opportunity to present their ideas to the executive team of Envestnet|Yodlee at their flagship event – GarageFest 2017.

The top three winners have received gift vouchers worth Rs. 25,000 each from Envestnet|Yodlee, cloud based digital financial platform. Further, the top 10 finalists will receive USD 1,000 worth of AWS Activate promotional credits for 12 months. One of the 10 finalists will also have the opportunity to co-develop a proof of concept with Infosys Finacle and will be able to showcase it at the Infosys Confluence at San Francisco.

As ‘ICICI Appathon’ was available virtually on the cloud to a developer anywhere. Over 3,400 participants took part in it from across the globe. In India, over ­­1500 of the entries came from non-metro cities like Vellore, Noida, Gurugram, Jaipur, Coimbatore, Bhubaneswar and Jalandhar among others. Further, it has witnessed significant participation from women developers with close to 400 of entries from them.

Hosted on the IBM Cloud based platform, ICICI Appathon offered a diverse set of over 250 APIs (Application Programme Interface), the largest set of Banking and Financial sector APIs in any Indian software development event. The APIs were from ICICI Bank and its group companies namely ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, ICICI Lombard General Insurance and ICICI Securities. As a first, payment APIs from ‘Visa’, the ‘Unified Payment Interface’ API from NPCI and ‘data analytics’ from Envestnet|Yodlee were also available for the app development challenge. Participants had to create innovative working prototypes of mobile applications using these APIs.

For updates, visit www.icicibank.com and follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ICICIBank

About ICICI Bank Ltd: ICICI Bank Ltd (NYSE:IBN) is India’s largest private sector bank by consolidated assets. The Bank’s consolidated total assets stood at US$ 152.0 billion at March 31, 2017. ICICI Bank’s subsidiaries include India’s leading private sector insurance, asset management, securities brokerage and primary dealership companies, and among the country’s largest private equity firms. It is present across 17 countries, including India.