Hackathon offers cash prizes, potential jobs

CAN You Hack It, a 24-hour hackathon by Hong Leong Bank Berhad is back for the second time following its debut success last year.

To be held on April 27 and 28 at Menara Hong Leong in Damansara City, it is a unique initiative by Hong Leong Bank Berhad under its digital innovation push, offering prizes of RM15,000 in cash, potential employment opportunities and even further funding and support for incubator or accelerator programmes for promising projects that are presented.

“We were very impressed with the energy and out-of-the-box creative thinking demonstrated by the last Hackathon’s participants, especially given the fact that they only had a day to complete the challenge.

“That’s the reason Can You Hack It is now one of the platforms we use for hiring. Some of the previous hackathon participants have interned with us and have also joined us full-time.

“In addition, we are also collaborating with some of the teams to commercialise their ideas.

“This year, apart from discovering fit-to-hire new talent for the bank, we want to focus on finding new thinking around how we can delight our customers through smarter banking experiences,” said Hong Leong Bank Berhad group managing director and CEO Domenic Fuda.

A collaboration with JomHack Malaysia, Google Cloud and Rakuten RapidAPI, Can You Hack It is one of the Bank’s initiatives in solving the challenge of hiring fitfor-future talent while immediately rewarding individuals and teams who demonstrate innovation and great ideas for better banking. These collaborations enable participants to build greater functionality and flexibility into their solutions through shared APIs, which are essentially a standardised way for applications to share information. One example is the inclusion of geo-location functionality through Google Maps.

Can You Hack It is designed to allow participants to propose their ideas or solve problem statements provided by the Bank, for a better digital banking experience or new financial services, products, coding and validating them, and then demonstrating a working prototype to a panel of Hong Leong Bank Berhad’s key executives and observers from the local digital industry and VC scene.

Registration is now open and more information is available at https://www.hlb.com.my/canyouhackit/. - Bernama