Published on the 23/10/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
The competition quality was such a success that an extra winner was selected and now Westpac plans to replicate the format internationally…
In July this year Westpac announced an A/NZ first, using a crowdsourcing competition called The Westpac App Challenge to invite programmers and designers to respond to a wide open brief and create an app that would make banking better.
Three winners have now been announced from amongst the 120-plus entries. Westpac New Zealand will develop the winning mobile banking apps with the help of their inventors who will also receive $10,000 each and retain the intellectual property to leverage the completed app internationally.
Westpac’s dead of digital banking, Simon Pomeroy says, “The quality of entries that were submitted exceeded our expectations and showed that the innovation in this space in New Zealand is world class. Originally, we were only going to select two projects but the quality of ideas and the benefits they will deliver to customers meant we had to extend that to three. We are very excited by the three projects and believe there is international potential amongst them. One or more of the winners achieving that would be a dream result.”
The winners are Steven Pinkham of Christchurch, David Arnold from Tauranga, and Wellington pair John Jackson and Justine Polkinghorne. The winning concepts cover security, payments and transfers and Westpac hopes to bring them to the market over the next six months.
Steven is a supervisor in a Christchurch supermarket and his winning idea came from observing customers at the checkout. He has a strong interest in software development and recently put himself through a tertiary course. David developed his concept from a personal experience that is widely shared by bank customers, while John and Justine researched and developed an idea that they believe will make financial management easier for targeted users.
“The ideas we’ve chosen are incredibly strong and we can’t wait to get into the building and development stage to bring them to life,” Pomeroy says.
Westpac is now preparing to launch an international app challenge.
