ICICI Bank announces winners of ‘ICICI Appathon 2017’

The ‘Grand Finale’ of the ICICI Appathon 2017 saw Rupam Das from Bengaluru; Bayesian Conspiracy, also from Bengaluru and Headfitted Solutions from Pune take home the top honours for developing the next generation mobile applications.

The eminent jury chose the top three winners from over 3,400 participants including a large number of entries from international developers and startups.

The winning entries will get the opportunity to collaborate with the Bank.

The first winning application focused on enabling term insurance eligibility checks based on a medical underwriting application. The other winning solutions emphasised on offering banking services based on voice commands as well as making offline payments using dynamic QR codes, respectively.
  
Anup Bagchi, Executive Director, ICICI Bank said, “We at ICICI Bank continue to put customers at the centre of everything we do. We continue to partner with a wider ecosystem to imagine, ideate and execute things which interest our customers and add value to them. In line with this vision, we conducted ICICI Appathon last year which was the country’s first virtual app development challenge. The programme enabled us to tap into the minds of talented technopreneurs as well as developers globally and helped us cater our customers better. The winning entry from last year was incorporated into the Bank’s mobile banking application and launched as ‘iMobile SmartKeys’, Asia’s first payments app using digital keyboards. We are extremely happy to note that this year too, ICICI Appathon has seen significant participation from across the globe. We have got some interesting ideas which we believe will enable development of breakthrough solutions, making mobile banking simpler than ever before. We will continue to promote innovation in every aspect of our business and ICICI Appathon will continue to evolve as a perfect platform for the young and creative minds to come together and showcase their innovations.”

Said jury member, Chetan Naik, Vice President - Sales, IBM India/South Asia, “We are excited to see the kind of innovation that has come up from the ICICI Appathon. IBM Cloud offers developers a gamut of services which helps them quickly- build, test, deploy, run and manage applications on the cloud. Our partnership with ICICI is to help them deliver unique experiences to its clients in the fast evolving digital era. Together, through the Appathon we are providing a platform to developers, students, and technology enthusiasts to deliver next-gen banking applications like cashless payments, voice-based banking, IoT-based models etc to make the services of ICICI truly digital keeping in mind the changing requirements of customers."

Rajashekara .V. Maiya, Associate Vice President and Head- Product Strategy, Infosys Finacle, “ICICI Bank, our long standing client, has been a pioneer in embracing the truly digital banking paradigm. One of the cornerstones of this new way of banking is to create a thriving innovation ecosystem around the bank’s APIs. Infosys Finacle is committed to work with banks, start-ups and independent developers to help next generation banking experiences evolve through such collaborative platforms. Together, we look to create new products and an experience to keep pace with customer’s accelerating digital lives and help emerging start-ups gain scale with our global presence.”

Pankaj Gianani, Country Head - Banking, India Sales, Tata Consultancy Services, “The banking sector is witnessing a rapid change in the business, technology and regulatory environment, more now than ever before. Ideas, either addressing or taking advantage of this dramatic change, are being born anytime and anywhere. The ICICI Bank Appathon has been a great platform to tap this universe of ideas and convert them into innovative solutions. TCS is proud to partner with ICICI Bank for this Appathon. We congratulate the ICICI Bank team for the great success again this year! “

Sandeep Singhal, Co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners, “It is great to see ICICI Bank promoting entrepreneurial initiatives in the financial technologies space to align with the overall thrust by the government on digital financial infrastructure across banking, payments and financial inclusion. Innovation at the grassroots level promotes new use cases through improved access and lower cost. As the leading private bank, ICICI Bank can help bring these ideas to market and drive widespread adoption.”