Open Banking Hackathon 2018: The Journey Continues

Hollie Dabson · September 25, 2018

The ForgeRock Open Banking Hackathon was a success! The event featured coders from all over, building applications against a fully working reference implementation of a PSD2 Open Banking standard. Chris Michael, Hackathon Judge and Chief Technology Officer at Open Banking, pointed out that this was the first hackathon to run using the full Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) model bank, calling it 'a world first'.

Eager participants arrived on Friday evening to meet their teams and discuss ideas. With help from our partners, Raidiam, along with some ForgeRock employees and a few from OBIE, mentors were on hand throughout the weekend to guide and support teams. Saturday morning opened with two key sessions: Open Banking 101 with John Heaton-Armstrong, Senior Associate at Raidiam, and A Deep Dive into Technical API's with our own Wayne Blacklock. Both were well received.

The weekend ended with eight teams presenting their applications to our three judges: Megan Caywood, Chief Platform Officer at Starling Bank; Will Beeson, Fintech blogger; and the aforementioned Chris Michael.

And the Winner Is . . .

All of us, in a way, because of the remarkable coding that took place, turning ideas into reality by the end of the weekend. However, we could only name one official winner. We applaud IT Smart Systems from Romania. They created an application named Pay4Me that answered authorisation issues for payments. The demonstration showed how an employee could request payment from a known authoriser, who would be promoted to authenticate the transaction via the Account Servicing Payment Service Provider, (ASPSP) in order to complete the transaction. IT Smart Systems will display their demo at Identity Live in London at the end of October.

The Open Banking Community

ForgeRock hosted this event to encourage the sharing of knowledge in the hopes that participants would inspire innovation among their colleagues and peers. Thanks to the members of the community working together, they did that and more. We hope to hold future hackathons to continue making progress as we continue this Open Banking journey together.

To learn more about ForgeRock's committment to Open Banking, visit us here.