After 36 gruelling hours of coding, designing and testing, Sage Pay's three-person team has emerged victorious at the ZappHack Revive Retail hackathon in London this week.
Backed by VocaLink-owned mobile commerce firm Zapp, the hackathon invited industry players to come up with novel use cases for pain-free and frictionless digital commerce.
ZappHack participants
Judges were unanimous in their decision to award first prize to the team from Sage Pay - comprising Rik Blacow, Jianfang Bladen-Hovell and Matthew Sant - for a location-aware ticketing application which connects to the Zapp API.
The app detects when users are in or near a registered event and then presents the opportunity for the customer to purchase a ticket and pay using Zapp. Once paid, a virtual ticket is sent to their device.
The consensus among the judges was that the effort was not only innovative and disruptive in its design but potentially had uses as a marketing tool and was the most fully realised and mature product demoed at the event.
Blacow, who led the team, claimed the product design was inspired by his nine-year-old daughter's experience of seeing classic English rock band Black Sabbath perform at a festival.
He says that the he attended the concert with his daughter but wasn't able to access the premium area because to access the area he was required to return to the ticket purchase section. This could be fixed, he reasoned, if he could somehow pay the extra for the premium ticket just by being in the right place.
Blacow's team won an all-expenses paid trip to South Korea, a hotbed of activity in the payments sector. Runner up Intelligent Environments, a UK-based provider of mobile and online banking technology, will be featured as a 'preferred partner' during Zapp's upcoming launch.
Another notable entrant at the Shoreditch hackathon was Deloitte's digital agency arm. The team showcased a personal finance management tool, Pow, which aimed to further integrate personal finance into the daily retail experience.
Youstice, an online application that allows customers to resolve shopping issues, also made a strong impression on the judges, who praised the team's simple approach to complaint management and its integration with Zapp.