The Reserve Bank on Tuesday has announced its second global hackathon called ‘Harbinger 2023 – Innovation for Transformation’ with the theme of ‘Inclusive Digital Services’. The statutory body has invited fintechs from all over the world to develop solutions that have the potential to make digital financial services accessible to the differently-abled, facilitate efficient compliance, extend the reach of Central Bank Digital Currencies and enhance the scalability of blockchains.
“Being part of HARBINGER 2023 gives an opportunity to the participants to get mentored by industry experts and exhibit their innovative solutions before an eminent jury and win exciting prizes in each category,” the RBI said.
Registration for the hackathon starts from February 22, 2023. The RBI has invited innovative ideas in four segments – ‘Innovative, easy-to-use, digital banking services for differently-abled (Divyaang); RegTech solutions to facilitate more efficient compliance by Regulated Entities (REs); Exploring use cases/solutions for CBDC-Retail transactions, including transactions in offline mode’; and ‘increasing Transactions Per Second (TPS)/ throughput and scalability of blockchains’.
Interestingly, the winner of the hackathon will be given a prize of ₹40 lakh and runner-up ₹20 lakh. To recall, the first hackathon was announced in November 2021 and results were declared in June 2022. It had received 363 proposals submitted by teams from within India and from 22 other countries including the US, UK, Sweden, Singapore, Philippines, and Israel.
Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of India has granted “in-principle approval” to 32 entities to function as online payment aggregators, according to a list released by the central bank. Applications of 18 entities are currently under review, while four were returned.
Those that were granted approval include Billdesk, Amazon, Google, Reliance, Razorpay, Pine Labs, Cashfree, Infibeam, Zomato Payments, Open, and Stripe. Razorpay and Cashfree have been barred from onboarding new merchants until further notice. Among the 18 applications still under process include those of Cred, Instamojo, PhonePe, Zaak Epayment (Mobikwik), and LivQuik.
The applications of Paytm, PayU, Freecharge and Tapits (Fingpay) were returned. They are “permitted to apply within 120 days from the date of return. Thus, can continue business subject to the condition that no new merchants should be onboarded until advised otherwise”, according to the RBI.
(Win inputs from PTI)
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