RenMoney’s #Rennovate2019 Hackathon is a Beautiful Example of How to Unleash Team Creative Spirit

Over the weekend, Fintech company, Renmoney held its in-house hackathon tagged Ren;novate; 2019 Customer Journey Lifecycle. The Renmoney hackathon was designed to bring out the creative geniuses in team members, identify leveraging options as well as proffer innovative technology solutions.

The TECHNEXT was a media partner of the in-house event and we are pleased to share with you some takeaways from the hackathon:

Team Bonding

The three-day hackathon featured 6 in-house teams: Team Interstellar, Team Zeus, Team BlueMoon, Team StarSix, Team Ren Excalibur, and Team Sunburst. Each team has an average of 6 members and with a leadership team member as a mentor. The team resided at the same location over the period, brainstorming into the early hours of Saturday and Sunday.

According to the Chief Executive Officer, Mrs Tobi Bashoro, members of the team were drawn from the head office and the other outlets. Just imagine how much interpersonal relationship this would have fostered.

In the course of the hackathon, the team members displayed unique skills in areas of research, product design, presentation, video editing and leadership: areas that they were hitherto not employed for. In the ideal day-to-day operations, some of these folks would not have displayed these soft skills.

Thank God for challenges with incentives!

Creative Solutions…

The final event on Sunday was highlighted by instances of problem simplification with each team proferring technology solutions that will distinguish the company in the Financial technology space, in a short while.

The solutions featured areas such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, customer relationship management, online application-to-disbursement processing and do-it-yourself options.

When deployed, these solutions will significantly reduce delivery time, improve customer experience and improve efficiency.

The fact that these solutions were designed by team members underscores the importance of the power of self-evaluation and innovative culture. These gaps exist, the folks know about it and they offered the best solutions because of their experience.

No external consultants could have proffered better solutions.

The Wisdom Nuggets…

In spite of its nomenclature as an in-house event, the event was graced by a number of important personalities who offered thoughtful nuggets to the participants. Damilola Jegede, CEO of Swipe, spoke about Design Thinking and Human-centered Design and Mr Sam C Okojie, the CBN Payment System Management Director was the special guest of honour.

Others include Mr Akeem Lawal, Deputy Managing Director, Interswitch Group; Enyioma Anaba, Group Head of Brands at Interswitch; Abiodun (Abby) Osoba of the Agile Advisor Nigeria; and Adedeji Olowe, Founder, Open Banking Nigeria.

The team of judges: Innocent Igiwa, Yvette Marshall, Daniel Watts, Adija Uzodinma, Khade Idogho, Taiyelolu Adenusi and Sayo Afolayan also offered exceptional tips as well as solid support.

The Winners

It was a shame that only one team could win and after all was said and truly done, Team Ren Excalibur was the team standing taller than the rest.

In second place was Team BlueMoon while Interstellar came third.

Other Takeaways…

The Ginger!!!
The atmosphere in the room was electrifying and hilarious thanks to the creative compere. This eased the tension usually associated with competitions and brought out the creative juices from team members.

Kudos to the organizers for the engaging sessions.

In sum

Renmoney has done well in so far: from being one of the new lending platforms around, it distinguished itself and made it to the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG)’s Companies to inspire Africa List for 2019.

With this hackathon, Renmoney obviously has the tools it can latch on to evolve fully into a Fintech entity that will define the Lending space in Nigeria.