Oana Coșman
More than 45 fintechs from all across Europe have registered to join this year’s 4th edition of Open Banking Hackathon - CEE Edition 2022.
After careful consideration, 15 teams from Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Croatia, Greece and Spain have been selected to move forward with the competition that started last Monday, September 26th until Friday, September 30th.
After 4 days of designing and programming digital fintech applications, the best 7 projects got the spotlight of being on the final stage in the Grand Finale Demo Night Gala: Am I Poor - Slovakia, Coinscrap Finance - Spain, EVE Innovations - Romania, Fincoro - Ukraine, OPA Wallet - Greece, Virtual CFO - Slovakia, Qpick - Poland.
The event took place in a hybrid format on Friday 30th of September 5PM CET, broadcasted live on the internet and in person from an emblematic financial location - the vault of the former Marmorosch bank in Bucharest.
After careful consideration, the 15 members of the jury representing - Google Cloud, the National Bank of Romania, Banca Comerciala Romana, OTP Bank, the law firm CMS, Capex.com, LaunchHub, Movens Capital, Day One Capital, Inovo VC, Innovation Capital, TechAngels, InnovX, Rofin.tech - have decided the winners of the 4 competition prizes:
- Grand Winner, receiving 3000€ cash to further develop their project, 2000€ in legal services from CSM and fast track to the Fintech Hack Global Dev Slam by Emirates NBD, is Fincoro from Ukraine, project that is developing an independent claim management system that connects all participants in one flow;
- Google Cloud Award, receiving 5000$ in Google Cloud Platform credits, goes to Virtual CFO from Slovakia, a startup founded by a team from Tatra Bank, in Slovakia, that is building an automated advisory tool that helps SME´s to efficiently manage their finance;
- Proof of Concept Partnership Award, project development with the Finqware team goes to OPA Wallet from Greece, a startup founded by students from Greece, that is is using open banking technology to view account balances and transactions.
“Throughout the Open Banking Hackathon, we have gained invaluable experience and are much closer to fulfilling our goal of helping businesses and their clients handle complaints more efficiently. The hackathon provided us the best opportunity to access techcelerator programs and partners, which will surely help us launch our product on the European market soon”, says Olga Gavrina, team lead of Fincoro, the competition grand winner.
To add even more significance to the Open Banking Hackathon, on the 27th of September important players in the fintech ecosystem like Christine Mai - Policy Officer, European Commission; Isabela Ibraim - Omnichanel Lead; OTP Bank, Tudor Tomescu - Head of Project Management, Capex.com, Charles Kerrigan - Partner, CMS UK, Katalin Horvath - Senior Counsel, CMS Budapest and Cosmin Cosma - CEO & Co-founder Finqware, gathered online for the “Open Banking in CEE” Roundtable to discuss how open banking has developed in Central and Eastern Europe in the last three years and where it is headed.
“We don't have a single market for digital finance yet, and this is what the European Commission is working to remedy. This will not happen overnight, it is taking steps”, stated Christina Mai - Policy Officer at European Commission who also states that there are expectations regarding the PSD3 and that her colleagues in the team are working very hard on this and what are the best options to move forward.
Additionally, Christine announces that "the European Commission has introduced law and legislation related to instant payments for the second half of this year. These initiatives help to strengthen our financial industry by putting the customer first."
The grand finale and awards gala for Open Banking Hackathon CEE Edition 2022 can be viewed online on the site www.openbankinghackathon.com.
