LoanDog hacks fintech competition at CHQ

More than 200 coders, designers, and entrepreneurs take over Dogpatch Labs for 72-hour coding blitz

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Pictured: Joe Heneghan, Ulster Bank; Patrick Walsh, Dogpatch Labs; and David Azcona; Enric Morey; Miriam O’Flynn; Juan Jose Nieto; and Pol Caselles Rico, LoadDog

The team behind Loandog, an app for helping students applying for and make loan repayments using transactional data and APIs combined with analysis from social media, were named winners of last weekend’s Ulster Bank Hackathon.

The 54-hour fintech hackathon, now Ireland’s largest, challenged teams to develop solutions to ‘everyday banking and collaboration’ problems.

The teams worked in teams to develop concepts to improve the banking experience and ‘hack’ these together to create working prototypes to benefit customers. The teams had access to a host of supports over the weekend, including the Ulster Bank API sandbox, which gives the opportunity to test prototypes in a mimicked production environment.

Mentoring sessions throughout the weekend were an added benefit for attendees, who could ask questions and gain insight from an array of engineering and industry experts from Microsoft, IBM, Nile and ViewsDX. Participants also had access to pitching workshops, so that they could not only imagine and create ground-breaking solutions, but also pitch these to the judging panel.

The event culminated in competitive public pitches to the judging panel, which was made up of Ulster Bank’s Joe Heneghan, Damien Daly and Amelia Casey, as well as Patrick Walsh, Dogpatch Labs and Claire Fitzpatrick from Consensys.

Other winners included Home2Home, a service allowing people to access financial advice from home.

Patrick Walsh, MD of Dogpatch Labs, said: “Here at Dogpatch Labs we’re committed to supporting and accelerating the development of Ireland’s startup community and we were delighted to once again host the Ulster Bank Hackathon, which has become a cornerstone event in the calendar of the Irish FinTech ecosystem…

“Ireland is growing every year as a centre for innovation in Fintech and the more companies that embrace this development in a collaborative and positive way, the more ground-breaking and exciting the outcomes will be for customers.”

TechCentral Reporters

Read More: Dogpatch Labs FinTech Hackathon Loandog Ulster Bank