The Reserve Bank of India on Tuesday announced the second edition of its global hackathon 'HARBINGER', where participants can showcase their innovative fintech solutions.
Participants can register and submit their proposals from February 22 to March 24. The winner of the hackathon will take home ₹40 lakh and the runner-up will get ₹20 lakh, the central bank said.
The four main focus areas of the hackathon include making banking services easy to use for the differently-abled, improving regulatory governance, exploring more use cases of the 'digital rupee', and using blockchain technology to enhance Transactions Per Second (TPS).
With the theme of 'Inclusive Digital Services', the second edition "aims to identify and enable solutions and/or business models that have the potential to make digital financial services more accessible, efficient, compliant and effective, enriching the experience of the users while exploring the technologies that can make the systems more robust and scalable," the press release read.
What happened in the 2021 hackathon
The theme of the inaugural edition of the hackathon was 'Smarter Digital Payments'. As the name suggests, the theme revolved around improving and scaling up the payment ecosystem in India.
A total of 363 proposals were submitted by teams from India and 22 other countries, including the USA, United Kingdom, Sweden, Singapore, Philippines, and Israel. The final 24 participants entered the last round of evaluation, which was held on May 26-27, 2022 in Bengaluru.
Tone Tag, a brand of Bengaluru-based Naffa Innovations Private Limited, was declared the winner in two out of the four categories. Its solutions included a voice-enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) or peer-to-merchant (P2M) payment system for customers.
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