Promising signs for India’s largest mobile app challenge

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ICICI Bank has announced the shortlisted entries for their inaugural ‘Appathon’, the largest virtual mobile app development challenge by an Indian bank.

ICICI Bank has announced the shortlisted entries for their inaugural ‘Appathon’, the largest virtual mobile app development challenge by an Indian bank.

Having formed two weeks ago, the ICICI Appathon has now seen entries form over 2000 participants from across the world, with one in six entries from female applicants.

In addition, the bank confirmed that over 40 per cent of local entries were from non-metro Indian cities including Nagpur, Coimbatore, Bhubaneswar, Jalandhar, Udaipur and Hubli.

ICICI Bank managing director and chief executive, Chanda Kochhar, said that the program has created a strong platform for “budding developers from even smaller towns” in India to showcase their talent.

“The participation from across the country including women developers and technopreneurs from non-technology hubs reaffirms the idea of launching this program that aims at offering a platform to budding developers who can create world-class digital applications,” Kochhar said.

“We hope to get ideas for some exceptional apps at the end of this program.”

The shortlisted entries were given access to over 50 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), which ICICI Bank claims was the largest set of banking and financial sector APIs made available in an Indian software development event.

Participants from the top 10 teams will also be offered the opportunity to enter the development round, demonstrating their solution before a panel comprising leaders from the banking, payments and venture capital circles.

They will be judged on five criteria that include uniqueness, functionality, business potential, user experience and scalability.

Using the APIs provided, shortlisted participants are now expected to create innovative working prototypes of mobile applications that provide a “superior customer experience”, with solutions to be submitted by the end of this month.

The full list of shortlisted participants can be viewed here.