KUALA LUMPUR: CIMB Bank Bhd, in its own effort and in collaboration with Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), has selected four winners from the pilot InnoChallenge, to further propel CIMB Bank in its course of revolutionising digital and mobile banking/financial solutions in the Asean region.
InnoChallenge is an incubation programme aimed at idea creation and conceptualisation of fintech (financial technology) solutions. It was launched in May 2015 and drew encouraging participation nationwide. Both CIMB Bank and MDeC mentored participants with the aim of fostering entrepreneurship and creating new fintech ventures.
“We are extremely impressed with the many great talents and ideas we received from MDeC’s ICON developers throughout the duration of this challenge. It has been an interesting experience to witness the insights, innovations and creativity on how we can collaborate to deliver new and improved integrated, comprehensive products as well as services to our customers in their digital ecosystem.
“We are in the midst of commercialisation and detailed technical discussions with the winners to bring their winning application to our customers in CIMB Bank and beyond to our region wide customer base, thus expanding their businesses to other markets within the ASEAN region,” Renzo Viegas, chief executive officer of group consumer banking of CIMB Group
said in a joint statement.
MDeC chief executive officer Datuk Yasmin Mahmood said: “The InnoChallenge competition itself is a testament that with the right ecosystem, incentives and encouragement, our local talents are capable of producing world-class solutions. MDeC will continue to work with strategic industry partners in providing competitive platforms to spur innovation. We also hope these successful talents will inspire other Malaysians to contribute towards an inclusive digital economy.”
Meanwhile, CIMB group chief information and operations officer Iswaraan Suppiah said technology development is entering a new era – one that is setting new standard on how fast innovations can be developed and how quickly viral adoption can be achieved.
“At CIMB, we are committed to building the necessary infrastructure to plug into this innovative ecosystem and enable more entrepreneurial ideas to be implemented more quickly across the region. Judging on the success of this first cohort of InnoChallenge, we are now in the works of pursuing the second cohort searching for start-ups and early stage fintech companies by collaborating with regional and global partners using Blockchain technology that will further build InnoChallenge.”
The winners were selected based on eight criteria, ranging from team strength, market opportunities and competitive advantage to technology innovation and business viability.
InnoChallenge offered prizes of RM25,000 for the grand prize winner and RM5,000 to the consolation prize winners. The grand prize was awarded to a wealth management platform developer while the consolation prizes were given to developers under the categories of SoLoMo (Social, Local and Mobile), social marketplace and bills payment solutions.
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