3 winning ideas at RHB’s hackathon to help the bank hit 95% digital transactions by 2023

[Written in partnership with Supernewsroom, but the editorial team had full control over the content.]

With the country’s national bank slated to announce its picks for the five digital banking licenses soon, it’s expected to see applicants step up to offer more digitalisation solutions for Malaysians.

RHB Banking Group (RHB)—part of Axiata’s consortium—is one of them, and the bank recently wrapped up its largest virtual hackathon, following the success of its previous year’s one. 

Called Get Your Hack On: Data Edition 2022 hackathon (Datathon), it attracted over 270 innovators who were tasked with proposing customer-centric solutions that leverage data analytics. 

Some helpful data

15 teams were shortlisted out of the 101 that participated. 

The competition comprised data scientists, analysts, and tech talents specialising in digital data, competing for their cut from the allocated RM26,000 prize pool. Participants also had the opportunity to gain additional Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud credits amounting to US$1,800 (about RM7,500).

Their goal was to accelerate RHB’s innovative products and services through enhanced customer experience. 

The Datathon circled around five problem statements:

1. Find ways to provide actionable insights on the bank’s marketing initiatives to better attract customers;
2. Help customers learn about their spending and saving habits;
3. Use machine learning to ensure the bank has the highest quality data for decision making;
4. Predict which customers will become affluent so RHB can retain them;
5. Provide the bank with actionable insights from customer feedback through multiple languages and formats.

Simpler and personalised banking

The winning solution came from Team Sachdave taking on the fifth problem statement. Called RHB Listening!, it’s meant to quicken the process of sorting through customer feedback based on urgency.

Using natural language processing, RHB Listening! is meant to receive and process survey responses that have been written in Malay or English into standardised language. This way, its artificial intelligence can determine the urgency of customer feedback based on frequency, time, or sentiment. 

Did you know: Natural language processing is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to programme computers to process and analyse large amounts of natural language data.

The solution is time-saving and able to minimise resources spent on customer feedback analysis. In turn, staff members can be allocated for other efforts while providing actionable insights that are backed by data.

Team Sachdave’s winning solution won them a cash prize of RM10,000.

As for the first and second runners-up, their solutions appear to primarily tackle the second problem statement, surrounding consumers’ spending and saving habits.

Team Alsetboost came in second place with their solution, Digital Financial Guru. 

It’s able to understand customers’ spending and savings behaviours to identify opportunities for them to save, invest, and insure based on their patterns and circumstances. The solution also aims to provide customers personalised insights throughout different life stages.

In third place was Team DurianPi with their solution RHB Finalytiz. Using metrics to cluster customers together, the solution benchmarks spending and saving patterns against communities. 

This is meant to help customers manage their spendings while receiving personalised suggestions in a way that increases activity on RHB ecosystems.

The bigger picture

One of the primary goals of holding this hackathon was so that RHB could foster community creation, developer engagement, and recruitment. 

The secondary objective is to solve complex problems through co-creation and co-experimentation of solutions within the tech ecosystem. 

RHB targets to achieve 95% of digital transactions and 50% of digital sales by 2023, as part of its digital strategy outcomes.

When asked about the bank’s traction thus far, Rohan Krishnalingam, Group Chief Digital and Technology Officer of RHB, shared that as of December 2021, 93% of transactions are conducted digitally, which is a 30% increase compared to 2017. 

To reach RHB’s targets by 2023, the team is taking steps to build customer-centricity through digital engagement, and by enhancing product proposition through ecosystem partnerships, among others.

It’s worth noting that most of the ideas mentioned above are at an early stage with little market and customer validation. Hence, RHB told Vulcan Post that they will not be integrated into the bank’s offerings right away. 

“Nevertheless, from our last event, we have identified two promising ideas that will be further tested via a pilot programme and if successful, it will be integrated into our product roadmap as part of our overall offering,” Rohan shared.

• Learn more about Get Your Hack On here.
• Read more about hackathons we’ve covered here.

Featured Image Credit: RHB Banking Group