Voice-powered Clever crowned winner at Money 20/20 Hackathon 

Walking past slot machines, roulette wheels and gondoliers pushing guests down the Grand Canal to get to your next talk, meeting or panel about the future of payments and banking? Must be time for Money 20/20 Las Vegas again!

Kicking off the conference again this year was the Money 20/20 Hackathon and after 24 hours of sleepless coding, brainstorming and energy drink downing this year’s winner has just been announced as Clever.

Clever is a voice assistant that helps merchants crunch their data to understand how their businesses is doing. In the demo a merchant asked the Alexa-powered voice assistant to tell them how much they’d made in revenues last month and the answer also provided year on year comparative data.

Here’s a snippet of their pitch from earlier today.

Clever beat other finalists to the top including: Leaf – table-side payments for restaurants; Frog – financial incentives to encourage kids to practise their instruments; Shared Credit Card – temporary access to another person’s cards for emergencies.

10 finalist teams are taking home a total of $125,000 in cash prizes between them.

Meanwhile, in another important win, female attendance reportedly climbed from 11% to 21% this year after a drive to improve diversity at the hackathon.

Judges

Judges included Kor Adana, writer and producer of the hugely popular Mr Robot, Ken Moore, head of MasterCard Labs, Joe Kleinwaechter, vice president of innovation and design and Worldpay, Ilkay Cam, senior director at Visa Developer, Scott DeAngelo, DVP product at Vantiv and Carol Juel, CIO at Synchrony Financial.

Submissions were scored in each round based on criteria including: simplicity, creativity (is it an innovative solution for the respective challenge?), impact (could the solution actually have real and valuable impact? and design – is the UX and UI appealing?

Stay tuned for more coverage from the show. 

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