Hackathons

An insight into how Niyo does it

A hackathon is a competition wherein several teams come together, each comprising experts from various domains, to compete and create prototypes for trailblazing ideas or to improve and build upon existing features. At Niyo, we hold hackathons because we believe they encourage the development of new ideas, promote interdisciplinary collaboration, and spark out of the box thinking.

Niyo has organized six hackathons in the past years and all the participants feel that these have been gratifying opportunities to work on projects of their choice. They’ve also given teams a great chance to challenge themselves in coming up with fresh solutions to revolutionise the digital banking space.

Just like the innovations that have continually enhanced our products, hackathons at Niyo too have constantly evolved. When the concept was first introduced in 2018, we were a small tight-knit group and our only product, a tax-saving solution, had been released into the market. The leadership team was looking for the next big idea that could disrupt the market with a radical change. We wanted to foster teamwork and nudge the teams to think far out and that’s how the idea of organising an in-house hackathon came into the picture. Hackathons have become a yearly event now.

Our CTO and Co-founder Virender Bisht sheds light on how hackathons became a part of the innovation mechanism at Niyo:

So far, all our hackathons have been in-house and in different settings, giving Niyoites a great opportunity to find a new perspective to address market needs and challenges. Here’s a glance at how our hackathons have transformed through the years.

The third edition of our hackathon in March 2019 was a quick 48-hour event. The teams had the freedom to come up with novel ideas that were not necessarily functional prototypes. Back then, Niyo operated from the Prime Ventures’ office, and most of the participants stayed overnight at the office to work on their projects. The founders stayed with them, encouraging, and guiding them throughout.

The next day, all the teams presented their ideas. There was no time limit for presentations during the Niyothons and the presentations went on for 4–5 hours at a stretch. Co-founders Vinay and Viren, along with Sanjay Swamy, Co-founder/Managing Partner at Prime Ventures co-judged the contest and the winners were awarded on the spot. A lot of ambitious ideas including, UPI integration in Niyo Global, Multi-wallet feature in Niyo Bharat, etc. came to light.

The fourth edition of the hackathon in July 2019 was a swift 24-hour challenge. The hackathon format was tweaked to encourage innovation in technology as well as in making a sound business choice. The teams were challenged to present their ideas based on any of the two themes:

Technology theme: Teams could present hacks related to technology that may or may not have a direct impact on the end-user. Any alternate tech stack/development/Quality assurance (QA)/management information system (MIS) was encouraged. The ideas had to be presented with quantitative metrics like performance, displaying the ease of implementation, and with a lesser resource footprint.

Business theme: Teams could share hacks related to customer-perceived features, operational improvements, customer experience enhancements, customer retention strategies, business MIS, Infosec, etc. The ideas were required to exhibit the UI/UX, indicate the positive impact to the end-user, and be QA ready for the presentations.

Prizes were awarded to winners across three categories: Technology, Business, and Founders’ choice. Exciting hacks such as Niyo on Jio, Rewards for transactions, Job portal in Bharat App, Niyo ultrasonic P2P, Near me, Hello-Goodbye, Kindly, Niyo hiring portal, Hand gesture for security and features, Voice-based biometric verification for the customer, and Donate for a cause were amongst the winning hacks.

The structure of the fifth edition of our hackathon in October 2019 was fine-tuned further. The themes were now shared well in advance, giving teams ample time to brainstorm with product managers and the co-founders before the main event. Much vetting went in, even before a plan for a stable feature/product was developed. The actual day of the hackathon was reserved predominantly for creating prototypes. The core idea guiding this significant change in the format was to ensure that by the end of the hackathon, the outcomes were as close to a finished product as possible.

Now that everyone had the chance to work on their projects ahead of time, all the teams from Bangalore and Mumbai travelled to Goa for a destination hackathon. The teams spent three days there with everyone presenting their prototypes to the judges amidst much fun and frolic.

The winning hacks from GOA-thon included: Niyo Virtual Card, Niyo Community, Gift card, The next big thing, Project Neo, Rewards engine for SMEs, Reconciliation system for DCB Rupay platform, Niyo EyE, Niyo Emergency for Niyo Global app, Surprise gifts, and Niyo Remote forms.

Sanjay Swamy, Co-founder/Managing Partner at Prime Ventures, our seed investor and also one of the judges at the GOA-thon, believes:

A new category of awards was introduced to make this fun GOA-thon much more exciting — Investors Choice Awards were given to the teams that presented: Bharat QR based payments to merchants, Micro savings for blue customers, and Niyo triply.

Come 2020, the pandemic forced us into working from the safety of our homes (Home >> Home-a-thon, you get the reference!). However, our hackathons weren’t left behind. Hackathons went digital with more challenges added to make them rip-roaring! The Technology and Business themes continued to be the guiding factors for Niyo’s growth, as well as the emphasis on our Home-a-thon.

The only difference was that all the projects in the business theme had to be signed off by the Product Manager (PM) in a production environment. Also, all the entries for the technology theme had to be presented with reference architecture and usage of APIs (Application programming interfaces), along with API documentation.

The evaluation criteria and prizes for both the themes somewhat varied now as the company was looking to boost the business impact. Hackathons were all about concentrating on the deployment of these ingenious features to bring about a sweeping change in the banking industry.

To make the hackathon outcome look much closer to a finished product, domain experts from the Product, QA and Design Teams were made available across the board for the hacking team to consult. An added incentive for these folks lending a hand to all was that if they helped a certain team, they’d be in for the awards too — a win-win for all!

Many of the cutting-edge ideas from our hackathons have gone on to become fully functional features across several of Niyo’s products, including:

While discussing the impact of hackathons on Niyo’s growth, our CEO and Co-founder Vinay Bagri shares that:

Check out Niyo behind the scenes to get a sneak peek at our culture, the cool people who turn ideas into reality with innovations and an Outside-in view of Customer Service at Niyo.

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