Northern Ireland’s first dedicated banking hackathon is to take place at The Mac, Belfast from Friday 13th February until Sunday 15th February. Organised by Ulster Bank, attendees will sign up to join together in a marathon of brainstorming and software building, focused on new thinking for banks and bank customers.
The weekend-long event is a partnership between Ulster Bank and global experts at the Open Bank Project. It will bring together a community of coders, designers, mentors and investors for an intensive period of peer-to-peer idea generation and programming. The goal is to provide an environment which fosters intensive innovative thinking and entrepreneurship for new service provision to bank customers. Participants will focus on the themes of making banking faster; helpful banking; inclusive banking, open data and emerging platforms.
Commenting on the event, Chris Davis, Chief Operating Officer, Ulster Bank said:
“We are very excited about this event. It’s the first of its kind in Northern Ireland and will bring together a community of people who are energetic, creative and innovative, to challenge the way banks serve their customers. As an industry we are going through a significant period of change - our customers are increasingly online, looking to interact with their money in different ways and we need to make sure that we listen to ideas from a non-banking community out there and are agile and proactive in meeting customer needs. At Ulster Bank we’re aiming to become the number one bank for customer service, trust and advocacy and we’re open to all ideas and new thinking on how to best serve our customers.
“We’ve also designed this event to reward innovative thinking and our prizes include incubation space at Ulster Bank’s offices, mentoring opportunities with our senior executives, drones and tickets to the upcoming RBS Six Nations Rugby games.”
Simon Redfern, founder of the Open Bank Project and CEO of TESOBE said:
“We at the Open Bank Project are thrilled to be working with Ulster Bank on these events. It’s great to be engaging with the fintech communities in Dublin and Belfast and we’re excited to see how this intensive peer-to-peer collaborative process will work in Ireland following a successful series of events we’ve held across Europe. There’s no limit to the ideas that can be explored and we’re thoroughly looking forward to seeing what emerges over the weekend.”
An event is also taking place in Dublin this month.
More information is available at http://www.hackmakethebank.com/go/ulster-bank/ or get in touch via twitter at @OpenBankProject
