Winners emerge in Zenith hackathon
Winners have been announced for the Zenith Hackathon (Zecathon), which took place during the third edition of the Zenith Bank Tech Fair. The event, themed “Future Forward 3.0”, was held on November 23–24, 2023, at the Eko Convention Centre, Eko Hotels & Suites, on Victoria Island in Lagos.
Sync, a team collaboration and workflow management platform that provides synergy and enables project management, task planning, messaging, payments, scheduling, and people operations, emerged as the overall winner in the Zecathon competition. The event had over 500 contestants, and Sync took home the grand prize of N20 million.
This is in addition to a mentorship programme with Seedstars, a company dedicated to implementing high-quality capacity-building programmes for entrepreneurs in emerging markets.
The second-place winner, Skill Up with Kahdsole (SUWK), a social-tech startup that provides an end-to-end platform for learning technical and vocational skills to empower young people, won N15 million and a mentorship programme with Seedstars, while the third-place winner, Tribapay, a payment processing gateway that allows for cross-border payments and transactions in Nigeria and Ghana, won N10 million as well as a mentorship programme with Seedstars.
Other finalists who took home N2 million each include Edupoint, Joovlin, Frootify, Izesan Limited, Natal Cares, Plychain.io, and Niteon.
During the Zenith Bank flagship Tech Fair, Dr. Ebenezer Onyeagwu, the Group Managing Director/CEO of Zenith Bank Plc, delivered a welcome address where he expressed his enthusiasm for this year’s Hackathon. He mentioned that it was the most significant aspect of the entire event.
“We have deliberately kept the best for the last. The high point of today’s event is the Hackathon. This is where we have the opportunity to see the immense creativity and talent in our youth as they come up with different innovative ideas.
“The good thing about the Hackathon is that the pitches you see presented are completely different from the ones we have seen before and we intend to make it far more elaborate as we hope that as we go into the future, we should be able to bring back winners where they can tell the audience their journey and how they have progressed so far,” Onyeagwu said.
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The two-day Tech Fair was a huge success with presentations on cutting-edge technologies like AI, Cybersecurity, Cloud Computing, and more. Chris Lu, the Managing Director for Huawei Technologies, Nigeria delivered the keynote address on “Artificial Intelligence – Application & Bias”.
The event also featured a goodwill message by the Honourable Minister of Communication, Innovation & Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani and Dr Doris Anite, Hon. Minister of Industry, Trade & Investment (represented by Dr. Femi Adeluyi, National Coordinator for the National Talent Programme).
Other eminent IT practitioners from top global brands who also made presentations include Demola Sanusi, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services; Temitope Aladenusi, Partner & Leader Cybersecurity, Deloitte; Andrew Uaboi, Vice President/Cluster Head, Visa West Africa; Dr Blaise Ijebor, Director of Risk Management, CBN; Keelan Singh, Head, UiPath EMEA Banking and Financial Services; Shweta Juneja, Partner, McKinsey Digital; Wole Odeleye, Financial Services Technology Lead, Microsoft; Ope Ajayi, Founder & CEO, Cinemax; Elo Umeh, and Managing Director of Terragon.
The fair featured two panel sessions. The first panel, which examined “The next frontier: Digital Wallets, Contactless payments and BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later)”, had Chris Lu as the host, with five discussants, including Fey Wong, Country Director, Palmpay; Premier Oiwoh, Managing Director, NIBSS; Vincent Ogbunude, Managing Director, Verve; Ebehijie Momoh, Country Manager, MasterCard, and Managing Director of Network International, Adelola Agbebiyi.
The second panel explored the theme “The intersection of Fintech, eCommerce and SMEs – Collaboration for Growth.”
