While the concept of a virtual hackathon is not much different than a physical one, there’s a lot to focus on to host a successful event. Here are some guidelines you will need to check when launching a virtual Fintech hackathon:
- Set a Clear Goal for Your Hackathon
Whatever your goal is, fostering a sense of community, branding, educating, building solutions or developing new disruptive ideas, make sure to communicate your objective clearly from the very beginning to set the stage for a successful and fruitful event. - Decide on a Theme and Problem Statement Fintech Hackathons without a well-defined theme and problem statement produce weak or unactionable results. Themes have to reflect the organization’s innovation strategy and the problem statement is usually a customer pain point or a business use case. Examples of problem statements include personal finance management, peer-to-peer lending, SME financing, e-wallets, blockchain for e-KYC, AI for customer experience…
- Use The Sandbox and Give Access to Your APIs/Datasets Our hackathons run using a state-of-the-art API gateway and sandbox environment that is accessible to over 10,000 developers and Fintechs globally. Financial institutions are encouraged to tap into this global community of innovators, who are keen to collaborate and build differentiated value propositions for their clients, giving them a superior experience and full access to tools and documentation to boost their productivity.
- Communicate More and More We cannot stress enough on the importance of communicating your expectations, goals and timing. Whenever it’s virtual, you need to educate and create awareness about the theme. Create the right messaging and promote the hackathon over social media, in thought leadership pieces and in short videos. Programmers and Fintechs tend not to dwell much on reading, and brevity will be much appreciated.
- Encourage Diversity When it comes to innovation, diversity and globalization are key. Try to encourage a culture of diversity by teaming up with members, who have different background and skills sets. Pay attention to the time zones though; participants might be joining from across the world, you need to instruct teams not to overlook this fact for a better collaboration.
- Prepare Ahead of Time Once the event starts, you would want to focus on keeping teams productive and working toward a definite goal. Educate participants ahead of time on the problem statements, expectations, tools, frameworks and other technicalities like access to the Sandbox, APIs, Data Sets,….
- Rock Your Hackathon No one wants a couple of dull and isolated days, and hackathons are known to be cool. Even if it’s virtual, it can still be full of fun. Bring life to your social media platforms, onboard mentors, encourage participants to engage, offer advice, networking opportunities and freebies if you can.