22 Group entities took part in this new season. 160 startups competed to come up with creative solutions around the central theme: “optimising customer experience in the Bank”.

Last weekend, start-ups mobilised to work on a series of challenges relating to the customer experience. They developed their customer-focused projects supported by Group business line experts, in Berlin, Brussels, Istanbul, Luxembourg, Nanjing, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Singapore and Warsaw.

Attending the event, Jacques d’Estais, Deputy Chief Operating Officer of BNP Paribas and co-sponsor of the BNP Paribas International Hackathon, commented: “Working with startups is a win-win cooperation : they enable us to offer innovative products and service and we benefit from their disruptive ideas and agile ways of working. We help them develop their business.”

Having come to encourage the start-ups, Thierry Laborde, Deputy Chief Operating Officer of BNP Paribas and co-sponsor of BNP Paribas International Hackathon, added: “The international Hackathon is an important part of our innovation strategy. The challenge this year is to create a state of the art customer experience to better serve our customers. This is fully in line with the digital transformation plan of the bank.”

The 2016 edition has already fulfilled its promises, with five of the nine finalists currently finalising their projects with the Bank. For example, Carsift and BNP Paribas Personal Finance will soon launch a tool offering advice on buying a car, the startup "Cadre de Vie”, BNP Paribas Cardif and BNP Paribas’ retail bank in France will propose a real estate portal offering integrated services before the end of the year.

After this first weekend, selected startups will have the opportunity to develop their solutions during a co-creation phase. They will be supported by the Group’s leading experts and resources to turn their project into an operational solution, serving BNP Paribas customers.

The BNP Paribas International Hackathon also reflects the accelerated pace of BNP Paribas’ digital transformation, and has a special, long-term place in its open innovation ecosystem.

Who are the big winners of this first round?

In France, they are 8:

BNP Paribas Personal Finance

wiGroup

wiGroup Is a Saas software company specialized in mobile transactions. It as been selected for its mobile retail reward solution.

Serious Factory

Serious Factory is the editor of the VTS software that allows users to create behavioral simulators for training, without the need for technical or design skills.

Banque Privée France

Q°emotion

Q°emotion is a digital platform that analyzes and monitors the emotions of the audiences with innovative semantic algorithms.

BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions

Visiblee

Visiblee is a SaaS solution which identifies anonymous B2B website visitors and converts them into clients

BNP Paribas Cardif

Vizir.co

Vizir.co is a sales & marketing chatbot software with advanced business analytics capabilities.

SPIXII

SPIXII creates superior automated customer experiences for banks and insurance companies, when selling and servicing their products.

Retail Banking France

Celestory

Celestory is a solution allowing the creation of personalized learning apps without coding, based on audiovisual pieces of content.