Sway Wins Yodlee Interactive 1st Place Prize at Capital One Hackathon

How can mobile and data visualization empower consumers around money? On March 6-8, our Yodlee® Interactive team had an amazing weekend at the Capital One® People & Money Hackathon. This event was held in San Francisco where 177 bright and eager developers spent the weekend hacking to create apps that help Millennials and American families get a handle on their finances. The goal was to build apps and create the next Fintech revolution. At the hackathon, Capital One, Xignite, Plotly, Nexmo, Elasticode and Yodlee Interactive offered APIs to developer teams. With our Aggregation API, developers can leverage consumer transactional data capabilities in emerging mobile and web applications. This competition, focused on “Reinventing Personal Finance,” offered more than $50,000 in prizes from Capital One and partner API companies. But the winners were also hoping for exposure and recognition of their work. Winning was based largely on whether their idea would be eligible to get funding in the future from potential investors. I judged the Yodlee specific piece of the contest based on how effectively our Aggregation API was used for Personal Financial Management geared towards the way Millennials live, spend, and save. The focus on Millennials as a highly mobile-engaged demographic was a recurring theme at the event. Based on my experience in working with startups, I chose the best new app according to these three questions: 1) What problem are they trying to solve? 2) Would this be a viable product? 3) Could this potentially get funding? Our first place winner was Ashwin Kumar who developed “Sway,” an app that allows personal budgets to “go mobile”. A shown in this video, Sway is a simple application designed to help users make better-informed purchasing decisions.                  Through an intuitive interface, users can find restaurants, bars and other activities around their location, and also get an estimate on how much they can expect to spend. APIs used included Yodlee (Aggregation API), Yelp (Search API) and Google (Places API). Curious about other API use cases? Click here to learn about other solutions you can build, such as: Personal Finance Management (LearnVest, MoneyDesktop), Credit Management (Credit Karma), Student Loan Management (Tuition.io), Pay Day Lending, Divorce Resolution Management and much more (See a few of our customer success stories). Overall, the Capital One Hackathon was successful. Lots of laughter, creativity and red-hot technology were front and center. As with most hackathons, we all enjoyed the interaction with other developers. In addition to the exchange of innovative ideas, networking and community were also valuable. Check out the photos and #PeopleMoneyHack for live updates on Twitter. Are you building a financial app that could benefit from account and transaction data? If you’d like to learn how to leverage Yodlee Interactive APIs, visit our developer portal or check out our test drive tool.