Team Meeco dived into the challenge of improving the lives of Australians¹ with transaction data at the Open Banking Hackathon. The 11–13 August, 2017 event, took place at Meeco’s Sydney residence, Stone & Chalk, was an Australian Payments Network (APC) and Open Bank Project initiative.
The challenge: How to improve people’s lives with open banking data?
Competing against 10 other strong teams with some innovative and thought-provoking ideas, Meeco were fortunate enough to take home the Best Overall App award.
Meeco’s solution
Flying in from the Adelaide office, the Meeco development team made the most of the flight by building an SDK on route to Sydney. The SDK was later open-sourced and provided to the community via this Meeco GitHub page.
Prior to the event kicking-off Team Meeco started white boarding ideas, exploring seven ideas, which were narrowed down two concepts; sustainable spending and loyalty.Next step was to analyse the Open Banking suite of APIs to assess which concept was the most feasible and created value for both customers and organisations.
The two ideas were put to a team vote, with the loyalty hack emerging as the front runner, based on the likelihood of execution and implementation.
Meeco’s approach to better the lives of Australians with open banking data was simple: Combine a range of account and transaction data to analyse spending across a variety of merchants, and then use this data to connect with loyalty programs.
Australians like to hack life, to optimise the “system”. If we knew what we spent, and who would reward us for that spend, then we can hack merchants’ loyalty programs to improve our daily lives- Derek Munneke, Head of Engineering, Meeco
What loyalty program you should sign up for?
Once logged in with the Open Banking credentials, customers give permission for the app to analyse their transactions and receive recommendations for which loyalty program can best optimize their lives.
It also looks at vendors with whom the user has transaction history to see if they offer loyalty programs, with the option to sign up straight away. People can also see how much money has been spent in each program and how much optimisation is applicable.
Why loyalty programs?
The loyalty management market is projected to grow to US4.58B by 2021 (Markets and Markets, Jan 2017). With other studies showing “more than seven in 10 global respondents (72%) agree that, all other factors being equal, they’ll buy from a retailer with a loyalty program over one without.” (Nielsen, Nov 2016²). Both the loyalty and financial services markets are integral to Meeco’s growth strategy, as these sectors rely on the effective collection and use of personal data. Core to Meeco’s philosophy is the development of new forms of hyper personalised solutions and value based outcomes by enabling the customer to bring their data directly into the value chain.
Providing secure access to customer controlled financial data from all providers, without the data having to leave the institution, the Meeco platform and marketplace provides an industry wide solution to the emerging open banking movement. Enabling both regulatory compliance and opportunities for service innovation, Meeco is well positioned to meet the growing demand for a new customer-centric data ecosystem. With a current focus on building and testing new customer journeys with enterprises through our Meeco Labs proof-of-concept platform, we are discovering what the most meaningful and value based experiences are for both the customer and the organisation.
Meeco’s efforts focused on open banking data facilitating loyalty on-boarding resonated well with the judges, who selected Meeco's solution as the Best Overall App. Following Derek’s pitch, (the full pitch can be seen here) the judging panel provided positive feedback on Meeco’s solution. The Judges asked some great questions around business models and the potential to integrate with a rewards trading program, both aligned to Meeco’s road-map. Meeco currently enables individuals to save, sync and share their data directly with the people and organisations they trust. Additionally, Meeco has been developing an eco-system of enterprise and government partners to leverage the suite of APIs and services to create a new trust based personal data market-place.
Having developed a Consent Engine in late 2015, Meeco is well positioned to provide a solution to the pending regulatory changes in Europe, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Personal Services Directive 2 (PSD2), both of which will impact Australian companies that provide services in Europe. Using the established Meeco Labs methodology and testing sandbox, we continue to build and execute new innovative user journeys with leading brands globally where user controlled and consent based data exchanges open up new commercial opportunities and value streams.
Like anything developed by Meeco, the Hackathon app was built with ethical data practices. This always means explicit user-consent and providing transparency on how the data is collected and used. – Katryna Dow, Meeco Founder & CEO
Mike Page, Meeco’s head of Platform Partnerships, supported the hackathon efforts through social media, taking out a prize for Most Active Individual.
Thank you, Open Bank Project and Australian Payments Council for the amazing weekend and the opportunity to contribute to improve the lives of Australians.
For more information check out the wrap-up of the Australian Payments Council’s hackathon here.
To learn more about how the Meeco platform is helping enterprises to develop new data led experiences where the customer is an active part of the value chain contact Mike.page@meeco.me
The SDK produced was published on GitHub and is available as an open source Typescript API for others to use in the future.
All Photos: Australian Payments Council
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¹ This web page is no longer available. To view an archived copy click here.
² This web page is no longer available.
