Our female hackathon Texx Factor

Together with Deutsche Bank, we hosted our first female hackathon, Texx Factor, at our offices, H:32. The main topic of the hackathon was “Women & Finance” engaging the participants to create tech solutions for women – made by women – to close the gender gap on various levels with the challenge to create a technical solution that motivates women to deal with their financial situation during their individual phases of life (school, university, career start, kids, marriage, family, parental leave, retirement) and help shape it. In total, 31 participants came together to form seven teams.

Ideas and solutions could reach from starting a career or family, to getting back to work or entering retirement. Why is this needed? Especially topics such as financial planning, investment opportunities and pensions are traditionally often neglected by women, and at the same time, appropriate solutions and products are usually developed by men. The seven teams had one and a half days to brainstorm ideas, develop prototypes and business plans, prepare their pitches and present their solutions.

Luckily, there was help on hand to support the teams: Texx Factor provided an interface with real customer insights and customer data: dbAPI from Deutsche Bank, which hereby enabled the participants to develop services for nearly all areas of life, private and business alike, based on high-quality bank data. Additionally, innosabi supported with their supercharger tool, to get consumer insights and early feedback on the concepts developed throughout the hackathon.

Overall ten coaches were available to support the participants in terms of design thinking, product development, technology, agile methods or pitch training. Every team had 4 minutes to pitch and answer afterwards questions from the jury members: Dr. Carolin Gabor – Managing Partner at FinLeap, Kirsten Oppenländer – Managing Director Innovation & Design Commercial Clients at Deutsche Bank, Agnieszka Walorska – MD at Creative Construction, Leitha Matz – COO at Zuper and Marcus Aßmuth – Director Strategy and Business Development and Member of the Executive Board at Deutsche Vermögensberatung AG (DVAG). All of the teams held great pitches and presented their innovative ideas.

The winner of the pitch competition is the “Space Hamster” team. The three team members came up with a financial literacy game with hamsters in space, enabling kids of any age to develop an understanding of money, wealth and life in zero gravity. The team won prize money of € 3,000, a day at the DeutscheBanInnovation Lab and finance coaching by experts from DVAG.

Team “Ryca” became second place with their idea of a woman to woman financial app bringing together women who want to invest in their futures and the women financial advisors who can best serve their needs, focusing on expats who want to invest in Germany. They won a day ticket for code_n festival, a finance coaching by the experts of DVAG and a half-day prototyping workshop by creative construction heroes, Berlin.

Third place went to team “BlockPension” who developed decentralized, secure & paper-free pensions based on blockchain with Deutsche Bank token to enhance access for women. The price was a finance coaching by the experts of DVAG and a half-day prototyping workshop by creative construction heroes, Berlin.

A big thank you to our sponsors and supporters: creative construction, de:hub, DVAG, figo, GFT, H:32, innosabi, KPMG, Scaling Spaces, wg data. Last but not least we would like to thank Deutsche Bank for hosting the event with us, the jury members and coaches, and most of all the talented participants who made the event so special for us!

We are already looking forward to the next Texx Factor Female Hackathon.