The 2022 edition of the annual Stanbic Staff Hackathon to boost employees’ creativity and encourage innovation, came off last week at the SBIncubator, Silver Star Towers in Accra.
Held under the theme, “Accelerating Internal Innovation through Cross-Functional Collaboration’, the two-day creativity-driven competition provided a collaborative platform for staff of the bank to showcase talent, think creatively, and generate new ideas that would hopefully translate into successful banking products and services.
The Chief Executive Officer of the bank, Kwamina Asomaning in his opening remarks, commended the team for putting together the programme and emphasized the importance of delivering client focused solutions in this era of digitalization.
He said, “Thank you so much to the organizers for putting together this exciting event. At Stanbic Bank we always say that we are client led and this means that we put our clients at the heart of everything that we do. Being focused on client solutions requires us to have the ability to solve problems because if clients are looking to us for solutions, then we need to be good at solving problems especially as technology continues to evolve. Our hope is to become an organization that is solution-driven; by learning, by doing. Having different approaches to learning is important and one of those approaches is the Staff Hackathon.”
Participants of the Hackathon were divided into five (5) teams and tasked to develop a solution for the bank in 48hrs. Team Titans, emerged winners after the period with a solution titled; Consumer Finance Solution, which seeks to create a financial system where Stanbic Bank can extend credit to households and individuals to buy household essentials through hire purchase.
Jessica Amoafo, a Credit and Risk Analyst at Stanbic Bank, a member of the winning team shared her excitement at their victory.
I am glad to have participated in this interactive programme. Well done to all my other teammates and all the other teams for the hard work we put into this. I am excited to work with the Digital and Innovation team to bring our idea from production to market.”
Team Titans received a cash prize of GHS 10,000 and a mentorship opportunity to bring their winning idea to fulfillment. First and Second Runners Up, Team Stanbic Mall and Team Rangers received GHS8,000.00 and GHS5,000.00 respectively, for their ‘Mall’ and ‘Farmers’ Choice ideas.
The Stanbic Staff Hackathon is part of the banks Blue Innovation agenda to promote innovation and digital banking within the banking space. The 2-day event was infused with a training program on a ‘Design Thinking’ to equip them with problem solving skills, as well as a panel discussion led by Foster Awintiti, Manager Youth Banking and Incubator under the topic, ‘The Role of Innovation and Data in Achieving Modern Day Banking’.
