MUMBAI: Moneycontrol, India’s business news, markets and financial content, successfully hosted its first ever hackathon – ‘Budget Hackabot Challenge’ in Mumbai on 16-17 December 2017. With the primary objective of bringing together the larger developer community to co-create useful solutions for consumers, the one-of-a-kind event specifically focused on simplifying financial queries as a run up to the upcoming Union Budget.

The hackathon achieved this in two ways, first of which was by encouraging participants to create a bot which could answer user queries. Secondly, the hackathon challenged participants to create a tool which enables users to learn about investing options and take decisions on personal finance.

The overwhelming participation at moneycontrol’s ‘Budget Hackabot Challenge’ brought in tremendous zeal from the sharpest technological minds across the country, contributing to the creation of a highly immersive environment. An eclectic mix of working professionals as well as students from renowned educational institutions in the country took part in the event. Going a step further in redefining how news and financial information is disseminated in the digital age, the hackathon identified unchartered areas of technology, thereby unlocking immense value for digital consumers. The winning team comprised working professionals from various firms, all of whom are graduates of IIT, Mumbai.

Moneycontrol, business head Gautam Shelar comments, “We at moneycontrol are always looking at ways to push the envelope of innovation in order to derive useful solutions for our readers. With an aim to explore new technological spheres and develop disruptive solutions using the intensive data bank provided by us, we are proud of the way the participants worked in collaboration to come up with practical solutions. We look forward to hosting more such relevant hackathons based on definite and real-world use cases in the future, thereby providing value to every cog of our stakeholder wheel.”

HDFC Life SVP E-commerce & Digital Marketing Analytics and Business Insights at Vishal Subharwal said, “The Hackathon provides a platform for talent to come up with innovative solutions to resolve genuine customer problems around goal based financial planning. Any financial plan typically includes elements of life insurance & health insurance as well as wealth creation at its core.”

Customer centricity is an important value for us at HDFC Life and we are hugely committed to digitization and automation of the life insurance value chain to help deliver this. This is reflected in our investments over the years in building simple & easy to use consumer facing technology & products be it term plans, health plans or ULIPs. As more customers start buying life insurance & health insurance online, HDFC Life's association with Moneycontrol provides us another opportunity to analyse reception of technology led customer solutions."

Network18 Digital chief product officer Avinash Mudaliar, “A significant focus of this event was to unlock the true potential of India’s young and astute developer community by encouraging them to create disruptive solutions based on real world problem statements. Over the course of two days, we discovered a new approach on how content, products and services can be seamlessly presented to our consumers by churning out useful solutions. moneycontrol will now work with the winning teams to put together a solution that can be deployed and showcased to their audiences for upcoming Union Budget.”

Team Findians, with an approach focused specifically on extracting context from queries put in by users, were adjudicated winners and bagged a prize money of INR 4 lakhs. Team Hackaneurs on the other hand focused closely on user interactions and the maximum value that could be created in the process, leading to them being adjudged runners up with a prize money of INR 2 lakhs.

As the winning team will closely be working with moneycontrol team for 45 days, they will be guided by the experts from the financial and technological domain to improvise and build up their final product which will be available across moneycontrol platforms.