Crowd Valley at Cornell’s Fintech Hackathon in New York City

Adit Vaddi, Crowd Valley’s Business Development Manager, on stage at Cornell Tech.

From Friday the 11th to 13th of November, Crowd Valley joined professionals from EY, Capital One, Addepar and CoVenture as well as students from institutions such as Cornell, NYU Stern and Columbia for Cornell’s annual Fintech Hackathon held at their Cornell Tech location in New York City. The focus of the event was to promote the innovation of applications and technology for two verticals: Financial Inclusion and Anti Money Laundering (AML). With $5000 in cash prizes, the event featured a large student turnout filled with exciting ideas to bring to fruition. 
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Crowd Valley was represented by Adit Vaddi, from our Business Development team in New York who introduced the Crowd Valley API to the students as a resource to use for their “hacking” and went on to discuss the capabilities that the API and the Digital Back Office offered in supporting the ideas generated in the Hackathon. Adit was joined by Michael Maloney, from EY who provided the keynote address for the event and discussed in the detail aspects of AML, Bitcoin and financial inclusion. With the conclusion of the key note by Friday evening, students dispersed to network, form teams and brainstorm their innovations to be presented to judges on Sunday, November 13th. In the development of their ideas, the students had access to mentors who were professionals in product design, strategy and technology who played an important role in crafting the final demonstrations of the students. 

After all the hard work and strain of Saturday came Sunday - Demo Day. Crowd Valley was joined by Tony Barnes from Capital One and Brian Stuckey from CoVenture to judge the ten teams and score their innovations based on the Product, Novelty, Scale of Impact and Viability of Business. All the ideas presented were very thought out and addressed financial inclusion as well as money laundering with the final results being:

Grand Prize: Old School

Financial Inclusion Vertical:
1st Place:  Money Days
2nd Place: Trim

AML Vertical
1st Place: 1KYC
2nd Place: Duns​

We wish all the participants the very best and would like to thank Cornell Tech for the time and effort in putting together such a great event.

For additional information on the winner and participants, please have a look at: https://fintechhackathon2016.splashthat.com/