Deloitte Digital brings back third prize from Barclays Data Wars Hackathon

Fifty-four teams from around the world, including 21 from South Africa, participated in the hackathon to build applications, products and solutions with the focus on improving Barclays' ability to scale and analyse customer data for a better customer service experience. The teams were given a choice of six challenges and had one hour to decide which challenge they were attempting and present their reasoning as well as the problem they want to solve in the dragon's den. The Deloitte Digital team chose 'customer spend' and 'making an impact on the younger market'. They were given access to 11 Gigabytes of customer credit card spending data - as well as a breakdown of challenges and opportunities facing the banking industry.

The Deloitte Digital team comprised of Yauvan Hansraj, Rachel Ing, Lucky Lekgula, Kgomotso Mathole, James Mclaren, Sumant Ramgovind, Caro Reinecke and Svata Sejkora brought a blend of skills across experience design, front-end development, APIs, services architecture and mobile engineering to decode data that would uncover solutions for human resources, collections, card spend, client banker relationships and markets.

On the eleventh hour

"The Deloitte Digital team, called Cloud Force, pitched to the judges a solution that would find insights into the spending patterns of banking users between the ages of 18 and 30, using Salesforce Wave Analytics. We completed our solution in 11 hours, systems integration analyst Yauvan Hansraj said. "Some of the brightest individuals in the country took part in this event. This was a big win for me and for the rest of the Salesforce team. We were proud to represent the Deloitte brand and next year we plan to win overall."

The Deloitte Digital team came ahead of all other consulting firm teams.

"We were honoured that our solution was awarded third prize for its innovation and creativity plus its ability to extend the customer experience for Barclays clients," said James McLaren, the Customer Applications Associate Director for Deloitte Digital. "We showcased our ability to create smart, innovative solutions at speed, an invaluable skill set an enterprise environment that is evolving rapidly in response to digital disruption."

Running on very limited sleep, the team built their solution from 10am on the Thursday and presented on the Friday morning. The winners were presented on midday Friday by the Barclays Africa Group head of corporate banking, Temi Ofong, and Barclays Africa Group chief analytics officer, Pieter Vorster. Barclays will be reaching out to various teams for in-depth discussions on how to implement solutions generated by insights that were presented at the event.