Cashfree Payments has announced the winners of its cross-team Hackathon — Switch On: The Gateway to Innovation! With this event the company intended to provide an opportunity to its multidisciplinary teams to demonstrate their skills, develop new projects in record time and switch on their creativity beyond everyday work.
The hackathon was focused on four themes: Cashfree Payments products++ (enhancements to the existing products), finance, team productivity, and security. Throughout the course of the event, the participants were assisted by 20 mentors. The participants were evaluated on the basis of innovation, critical thinking and problem-solving skills by 35 judges. The panel of judges and mentors pool consisted of the CXOs and senior leadership at Cashfree Payments.
Akash Sinha, co-founder & CEO of Cashfree Payments, said, “It gives us immense pleasure as we successfully conclude our very first hackathon – ‘Switch On’ – a quest for innovative minds to develop creative solutions for real-time business and technical challenges. The distinctive format of hackathon has certainly contributed in boosting collaboration across teams and fostering learning and skill development as teams worked on devising enhanced solutions, product ideas, and presentation skills.”
He further added, “Our aim has always been to foster a culture of innovation and collaboration, and activities like these contribute significantly. Above all, they lead to employee delight and make the workplace more fun. The eventful past few years have presented us with opportunities to create quality products keeping the best interests of our customers in mind. Hence, we have laid a special emphasis on innovation to enhance our operational capabilities and product delivery. We believe that this hackathon has surely given impetus to this mindset.”
The winning team, Flawless Super Sonics, received a cash award of INR 3 lakh along with an all-expenses paid trip to Global DevSlam in Dubai in October this year for their winning proposal. Team SDE – Sleep Deprived Engineers was the first runner-up and received INR 2 lakh, and Team Its HR Thing secured the second runner-up position and received INR 1 lakh. Furthermore, the firm also awarded prizes to the 4th and 5th finalists, in addition to several special prizes.
The hackathon’s rules stipulated that the teams must have a minimum of two and maximum of five members. The event served as a stimulus for team collaboration as it required that each team include at least one individual from outside the Engineering and Product domain. Cashfree Payments received registrations from 55 teams for the hackathon event, out of which 52 teams were shortlisted based on the eligibility criteria.
With over 50% market share among payment processors, Cashfree Payments today leads the way in bulk disbursals in India with its product Payouts. Recently, India’s largest lender, SBI invested in Cashfree Payments underscoring the company’s role in building a robust payments ecosystem. Cashfree Payments works closely with all leading banks to build the core payments and banking infrastructure that powers the company’s products and is also integrated with major platforms such as Shopify, Wix, Paypal, Amazon Pay, Paytm and Google Pay. Apart from India, Cashfree Payments products are used in eight other countries including the USA, Canada and UAE.
