A seven man team from Barclays Bank, using tools from FreedomPay and their own Pingit mobile payments app, emerged with top honours at Microsoft's week long Digital Wallet Foundry hack-a-thon in London.
The Barclays team used the FreedomPay platform to develop a digital wallet app on a Microsoft Windows Phone, dubbed with the brand name Zoosh. The final Zoosh product was showcased, after a week of non-stop development at the Digital Foundry, by demonstrating how the payments service could be used to bypass traditional ticketing routes when entering theme parks, says Paul Wilshaw, creative lead at Barclays.
The Barclays team received a £500 restaurant voucher, as a prize for coming tops in the Digital Wallet Foundry hackathon.
Watch Paul Wilshaw describe the hack-a-thon experience here:
Despite the congenial atmosphere at the uber-trendy Shoreditch location - a renovated Victorian School called Modern Jago - the results of Microsoft's hack-a-thon was not without controversy. While Barclays had between five to seven coders and developers working on Zoosh throughout the week - the other development teams at the hack-a-thon tended to be smaller two or even one man teams - making it very difficult to come out ahead of the polished Barclays group.
One of those single developer teams, David Hearn, software architect from financial services consultancy Consult Hyperion, built a smartphone enabled mobile POS for chip and PIN and mag stripe cards. The Microsoft Windows 8-based, Windows Phone application communicates over blue tooth to a Miura chip/swipe device - effectively putting a merchant POS dongle, like iZettle on a phone.
Hearn describes the development of the mobile POS app here:
Other development teams involved in the Digital Wallet Foundry included a team from 3M, which built a vertical merchant acquiring solution aimed at petrol stations called Turo. This sat on top of FreedomPay's payment services and also hosted on Azure virtual machines. Another team from Monitise, led by Dave Hermit developed a loyalty redemption service aimed at UK consumers.