July 17, 2017 – The payment industry is experiencing an unprecedented amount of innovation and growth, and much of it will be on display at the annual Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas this week. Leading into the event this weekend, Visa was a lead sponsor of the 24-hour hackathon where more than 600 participants competed to create new experiences that could expand commerce in previously unseen ways.
Participants were granted access to Visa’s digital commerce APIs such as Click to Pay with Visa, Visa Token Service, Visa Direct, Mobile Location Confirmation and Merchant Search. All APIs are available through the Visa Developer Platform, an open-source platform designed to help financial institutions, merchants and technology companies meet the demands of consumers and merchants, who increasingly rely on connected devices to shop, pay and get paid.
Prior to arriving onsite, Visa invited coders to participate in several meet-ups and prepared developers through online courses that focused on coding, payments and the Internet–of-Things (IoT). Onsite, competing teams received:
- Guidance and feedback from Visa product, technology, marketing and communications experts
- Arduino kits and Amazon Echos to build connected devices prototypes and IoT projects
Share.CreditCard and Warren were the two winning teams of the Visa Challenge, who each received a $25,000 prize, four Microsoft HoloLens, a travel package to the 2017 Pro Bowl, and promotion via Visa channels. The winning ideas were:
- Share.CreditCard provides access to credit cards through a mobile application using the Visa Token Service. Instead of moving money, they move access to money so that friends and family can receive fast access to your card with a limited-use token so they can pay at NFC-enabled POS or to withdraw cash at NFC-enabled ATMs.
- Warren is your very own personal investment advisor delivered through Alexa using the Visa Direct API. Warren connects to various sources of information for social data, financial data, market news and ticker data and uses the Visa Direct API to connect financial institutions, enabling users to move money between their accounts.
The two Visa-chosen teams were amongst the final ten Money20/20 winning teams, with Warren in the top five and Share.CreditCard in the top ten. Warren and Share.CreditCard received an additional $20,000 and $5,000 from Money20/20, respectively.
As a leader in digital payment innovations, Visa is a proud supporter of those who not only change the way consumers and businesses alike transfer money, but of those who usher a new era of payment technology. To learn more about how to build with Visa APIs, please visit developer.visa.com.
