Hack [Make] The Bank: API & Innovation
21st March 2014
The Open Bank Project are hosting the second instalment of their ‘Hack [Make] The Bank’ hackathon at Level39 today.
Hackathon organiser Ismail Chaib commented that ‘Hack [Make] The Bank’ is all about bringing genuine, consumer-focused innovation closer to the banking and financial services sector. The focus on the customer is key to the day’s proceedings – with initial ideas including an app that could help a homeowner repay their mortgage quicker, and a method to send cash using existing chat-services such as Whatsapp.
As the name of the hackathon suggests, the 40 hackers in the room are united by the common goal of ‘making’ banking better. The hackers are joined by representatives from 7 companies that have opened up their APIs for use during the hack.
Some of the APIs were open-source before the hack, but some were tweaked, tuned and made available for the purposes of ‘Hack [Make] The Bank’. Paul Murphy of Op3nvoice let us know that the php library to support the Op3nvoice API was completed 45 minutes before the hack started!
The API partners for the hack are listed below. Well worth checking them out:
Open Bank Project: “The Open Source API for banks. It provides a RESTful API that supports multiple views on transaction data, comments, tags and geolocation. For this hackathon, we are happy to announce that we are connected to Temenos Interaction framework which gives your application a reach of more than 700 banks worldwide.”
Temenos: “The Temenos API is built on T24 and the IRIS interaction framework; it offers Retail Internet bankings services for Demand Deposit Accounts, Funds Transfers and Messages plus Core employees banking services for various financial functions and maintenance services.”
Op3nvoice: “People can use Op3nvoice to index video catalogues and make them searchable. Alternatively, you can take audio recordings and flag particular key words or phrases that are particularly interesting.”
Paypal: “Our APIs now support Direct Credit Card as well as PayPal payments, are available as native SDKs on iOS and Android and as a great REST API, and even now allow you now to take a one-off authorisation that can be used to facilitate a number of payments to be made later. This last one is now used by Uber and many other companies in their mobile apps.”
Import.io: “Import.io is a platform which facilitates the conversion of semi-structured information in web pages into structured data. This structured data can be used for anything from driving business decisions to integration with apps and other platforms. Here’s an example using Yahoo Finance stock data.”
PixelPin: “PixelPin is a single sign on solution which replaces passwords with pictures. #KillThePassword”