ECE NTUA students granted the first prize in National Bank of Greece’s i-bank #fintech 2 crowdhackathon
NBG i-bank #fintech crowdhackathon is a hackathon competition that was organized by National Bank of Greece (NBG) on financial technologies. During this three-day marathon on fintech application development contestants, who may come from any background (i.e. technical, financial or business), are challenged in order to develop applications that aim to tackle everyday needs on the financial sector, although the spectrum of applications may be wider. In this years’ NBG i-bank #fintech 2 crowdhackathon, which took place between 20th and 22nd October 2017, a team of 3rd-year undergraduate students from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National Technical University of Athens, won the 1st prize in the competition. The first prize comes with a monetary prize of 5.000 euros from the National Bank of Greece and possibly a position at a startup accelerator.
Specifically, the team implemented a fully-working and automated contactless transaction system which works with a mobile application on devices that support NFC (Near-field Communication) technology. The customer of a retail store would scan the NFC tags placed on the products he wants using his smartphone, checkout with his device and leave the store without having to wait or go to the cashier, thus waiting on queues with frustration. Meanwhile, a two-step verification system was implemented: At first, the payments were processed using NBG’s openAPI and then the transactions were verified using a blockchain layer, which tracked the products’ state and stored transactions providing the shop owner with full control of the transaction chain, therefore serving as a tracking system for bought commodities. Finally a homebrew 3D printer was for rapid prototyping of items needed for hardware and demonstration purposes, such as an IoT-integrated anti-theft lock using a RaspberryPi Zero W.
The winners of the competition are (alphabetically):
- Ioannis Daras (ECE, 3rd year)
- Marilena Oikonomopoulou (ECE, 3rd year)
- Marios Papachristou (ECE, 3rd year)
- Maria Parelli (ECE, 3rd year)
Congratulations to all of our students for their distinctions, which reflect the quality of the educational and research work done at NTUA.
More info about the contest can be found in this link.
