The University of Minnesota and Virtual Incentives, a leading digital reward fulfillment company for global brands, provided $100,000 in prize money to Visa Developer Challenge winners at the Money20/21 Hackathon.
The Money20/21 Hackathon is the world’s premier event showcasing the best developers, empowering them to reveal their skills and vision using the APIs, SDKs, and other tools from today’s leading payments and financial services innovators.
For the 24-hour hackathon, Visa was a sponsor, and awarded a prize to the top innovators including $100,000 to each of the two winning teams following an intense contest that brought out the best in everyone. Virtual Incentives worked with Marqeta, a payment innovation platform, and Visa to fulfill the need for custom, digital rewards for the winners, which enabled them to go home with a new mission to take their bold vision further afield.
Speaking about the success of the event, Jonathan Price, CEO of Virtual Incentives said, “Visa Virtual Account was the perfect solution for the Hackathon – it is progressive and easy to use – which matched up perfectly with the innovative theme of the event.”
He also pointed out how effortless the process had been to set up the Visa Virtual Accounts for the winning teams in his remarks. “Visa wanted to reward winners quickly and effortlessly. We teamed up with Marqeta and were able to set up the Visa Virtual Accounts and deliver them directly to the Hackathon winners.”
After an intense 24-hours of coding that went into the night, 25 teams completed a project and presented their demos to the Hackathon’s judges. 14 of those used Visa Developer APIs. Half of the top 10 teams used Visa APIs, and the projects varied from mobile P2P demos through to facial recognition for checkout projects.
Two winning teams of the Visa Challenge each received $100,000 and other prizes after the projects were assessed. One of the teams received its prize money distributed as Virtual Visa through the Virtual Incentives platform.
“Implementing the use of blockchain and Visa API to solve real-world problems has always been an idea I envisioned but wasn’t able to execute due to limitations,” said the winning team lead by Mervyn Goh, aged 22 from Singapore.
Judges for the Hackathon included industry leaders at high tech financial firms from around the world. The Hackathon was held virtually in Las Vegas, and the winning teams are now working on their next projects for 2021.
