A five-person team from Malaysia has walked away with a $100,000 prize after emerging victorious in the grand finale of MasterCard’s globe-trotting Masters of Code hackathon.
MoneyRemaid was the winning team awarded the title in the first MasterCard hackathon in Silicon Valley, beating off competition from finalists from 12 regional events held throughout the year.
They built a software platform which aims to challenge the way domestic workers in Southeast Asia can manage their salaries.
The team's focus was to push for financial inclusion in Malaysia for the 300,000 migrant workers who struggle with access to financing and high remittance costs when sending money home.
Their SaaS platform uses MasterCard Simplify Commerce and MoneySend APIs to automate payments and aggregate remittances.
“When we came up with the idea for MoneyRemaid, we were inspired by MasterCard’s commitment to financial inclusion,” says Daniel Lim Fung Hsing, leader of the MoneyRemaid team. “We share the same vision and wanted to create a service that promotes financial literacy and improves the inclusion standing of underprivileged and underbanked workers in our region.”
Alongside the $100,000 in seed funding, MoneyRemaid also qualify for incubation in the MasterCard StartPath program, six months of executive mentoring and free payment processing for up to $250,000 in transactions for the first 12 months using the card scheme's Simplify Commerce platform.