More countries will be involved this year – eight, up from five for the 2015 event. The theme of the 2016 Hackathon is: ‘Streamlining the Customer Journey through co-creation with start-ups.’

This year San Francisco, London, Paris, Brussels, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw and Istanbul will all play host to the BNP Paribas International Hackathon. In each of these cities, 10 - 15 tech start-ups will be working in tandem with various BNP Paribas businesses on customer-oriented projects designed to improve the customer journey in such areas as home purchase, consumer goods, treasury services for small and medium sized businesses, and online finance advisory.

Interested tech start-ups may apply to take part in the event – entitled ‘Streamlining the Customer Journey through co-creation with start-ups’ – via the international-hackathon.bnpparibas/ website. The selected teams will work simultaneously in the eight host cities on the weekend of 17 -19 June.

The start-ups will be working alongside a number of BNP Paribas Group businesses including French Retail Banking, BNP Paribas Fortis, Bank of the West, TEB, BNL, BGZ BNP Paribas, Consorsbank, BNP Paribas Corporate & Institutional Banking, BNP Paribas Personal Finance and BNP Paribas Cardiff.

“The BNP Paribas International Hackathon is a multi-country, multi-business programme which demonstrates our long-term involvement with start-ups,” underlined Jacques d’Estais, BNP Paribas Deputy COO and Head of International Financial Services, explaining: “Following the weekend event, the selected finalists will be invited to take part in a 5-month Digital Bootcamp, where they will fine-tune their projects with assistance from the Group’s in-house experts and will make their final pitches at the Demo Day in December. The winning teams will then go forward to the prototyping phase, during which they will each work hand-in-hand with one of the BNP Paribas Group’s businesses.”

“With this second round of the International Hackathon, we continue to drive forward our digital transformation in a spirit of partnership that is mutually beneficial to both the Bank and the participating start-ups. This is yet another addition to the strong ecosystem that we’re building around Open Innovation,” stressed Thierry Laborde, BNP Paribas Deputy COO and Head of Domestic Markets, pointing out: “These efforts we’re making will enable us to develop technological innovations in line with the various Customer Journeys that we’ve set out in our 2020 Strategic Plan.”

The start-ups will retain their rights to the intellectual property arising from any projects that are implemented at the Group. Each of the six winning start-ups from the 2015 Hackathon is currently working to develop its project in tandem with one of the BNP Paribas businesses.