Money20/20, the world's largest event for payments and financial services innovation--with more than 7,500 attendees, including over 780 CEOs present at this week's event--today announced the winners of its inaugural Money20/20 Hackathon.
The Money20/20 Hackathon took place on Saturday-Sunday, November 1-2, with challenges to develop a variety of FinTech applications using APIs, SDKs and other tools presented by the following sponsoring companies: Bionym, Blockchain.info, Chain.com, Feedzai, Intuit, MasterCard, Mercury Payment Systems (a Vantiv company), ModoPayments and PayPal. FinTech growth equity firm Oak HC/FT also sponsored the Money20/20 Hackathon.
More than 450 talented developers, designers and entrepreneurs from across the globe competed in teams of one to five members during the 24-hour competition, and completed over 100 projects. Participants ranged in age from 15 to 56 and traveled to the hackathon in Las Vegas from as far away as Taiwan and New Zealand.
Each of the following five winning teams claimed a $20,000 prize:
- Bacon Bacon
- BitPredict
- HourFlow
- PayperLess
- ShopperPal
Each of the following five winning teams claimed a $5,000 prize:
- Authbank
- Bitcoin Bookie
- Kill Bill
- LoyaltyPass
- SWFT
PayperLess, this year's grand prize winner, earned the opportunity to participate in Money20/20's exclusive Launchpad360, a program that provides companies with a forum to showcase leading-edge innovations in front of a large audience of investors, media and other ecosystem participants. PayperLess's three-member team--Aldo Briano, Veronica Borges and Eduardo Medina--utilized Mercury's StoreCard™ infrastructure API to enable consumers to pay local merchants using bitcoin without any changes to existing infrastructure and business processes. The PayperLess team presented as part of Launchpad360 on Wednesday, November 5, and met with significant industry praise and interest.
Aldo Briano of PayperLess said: "We are extremely honored to win this award, especially with all the excellent technology and talent displayed at the Hackathon. Ou and talent displayed at the Hackathon. Our solution will enable merchants to accept a bitcoin payment as easily as accepting a payment through a gift card and we see this as the future of payments. We were thrilled to present PayperLess at Launchpad360 as well as with the audience engagement."
"Mercury is proud to lend its support to the Money20/20 Hackathon," said Matt Ozvat, vice president of developer integrations at Mercury, a Vantiv company. "Mercury is a technology platform that fosters and enables solutions that can solve merchant and consumer problems. We were impressed by the ability of PayperLess to develop an innovation on top of our StoreCard prepaid product. Their solution innovated in a way we didn't think possible in such a short timeframe, and moreso we were impressed by the ease with which their technology can be adopted by merchants."
According to Simran R. Aggarwal, co-founder and president of Money20/20: "Participants at this year's inaugural Money20/20 Hackathon showed outstanding levels of innovation and ingenuity in creating solutions that have the power to be truly disruptive to the payments industry. We are proud to offer the ability for participants to showcase their products and look forward to following their future success."