One of the most influential people in technology, JP Rangaswami, a mentor and friend of Railsbank co-founder Nigel Verdon, has agreed to be the keynote speaker and a judge at #OpenBankHack18; the yearly open banking hackathon which kicks off on Friday in London - further details here www.railsbank.com/openbankhack18.
Nigel said: “To get JP along to our event is a great honour. He’s a very busy man and in great demand. This is an individual who has shaped technology thinking for decades and I know he’s looking forward to meeting all the people we’ve got coming to this exciting event.”
JP’s CV is long and prestigious. He’s a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, an Adjunct Professor, Electronics and Computer Science, at the University of Southampton and a Director and Trustee of the Web Science Trust.
He’s also held many senior positions throughout industry, including Chief Data Officer and Group Head of Innovation at Deutsche Bank; Chief Scientist at Salesforce; Chief Scientist at BT; and, CIO at Dresdner Kleinwort.
And when you have a minute, check out his TED talk. Called Information is Food, it has been viewed over 684,000 times.
The annual #OpenBankHack is a 48-hour hackathon which brings together innovators to create innovative banking and fund management services using API’s.
Sponsors are Kompany, Aprexo and AimBrain, which will also be bringing its biometric authentication API to the sandbox.
Alongside JP Rangaswami, the other judges are: Tarne Bevan, COO Investments at GAM; Gabrielle Inzirillo, Director at Plug & Play Ventures; Alexa Fernandez, Open Innovation at BBVA; Peter Bainbridge-Clayton, Chief Technology Officer at kompany; Andy Thomas, Chief Technology Officer at Aprexo and, Adam McGreggor, Chief Platform Officer at Railsbank.
Top teams have signed up for this year’s event, including University of Yale, London School of Economics, University of Bath, University of Warwick, Bloomberg and Oracle.
It all takes place at the University of Greenwich, London.
Those attending form teams and collaborate with mentors, mostly senior FinTech sector entrepreneurs and executives. They then create innovative solutions to a number of challenges.
These are based around tackling financial crime; opening up the world of fund management, taking compliance manuals from the world of paper into the world of digital, preventing fraud with biometric authentication and building a challenger bank within 48 hours.
Event details can be found here.