Team Razer Blazers, comprising of Clarence Pang, Randy Lai and Shao Shxuan from the School of Information Systems, and Isaac Lee Yi De from Lee Kong Chian School of Business, have emerged as one of two winners at the inaugural Razer Fintech Digital Hackathon held from 15 to 17 May 2020 in Singapore.

Organised by Razer Fintech, one of the largest offline to online digital payments networks in Southeast Asia, the competition was supported by Singapore Management University and the Singapore Fintech Association.

A total of 125 teams and 420 participants took part in the hackathon to solve some of the most pertinent problems in daily banking today. 20 teams were selected for the semi-final, and five for the finals, during which each team had to give a pitch for their digital banking prototype.

The SMU team took on the challenge of “Financial services and products today lack innovation to address the experiential youth lifestyle” and developed a solution to tackle the problem of subscription fatigue which has set in among many people today due to the ever-growing number of subscription services.

The solution aimed to provide consumers with the ability to manage their subscriptions easily and to provide them with access to subscriptions at discounted prices. This involved building a mobile application with the intention to integrate with Razer Pay, Razer Fintech’s e-wallet service. With their solution, users would be able to track what subscriptions they are paying for, discover and sign-up for new subscriptions easily, cancel subscriptions they no longer need, track when their next payments are due, and choose how they want to pay for their subscription services.

The team split the work according to each person’s specialities and technical competencies. Isaac took on the business product owner role, which included preparation of the pitch deck, demo video and sharpening the business concept. He also helped in testing the APIs required for the solution using Postman software. Shao Shxuan was the front-end developer who focused on building the user interface on the mobile application and ensuring it can communicate with the backend systems. Randy, the back-end developer, set up the back-end databases on AWS and ensured it was connected to both the front-end and other external APIs. Clarence was the solution architect who ensured that both the backend and frontend were working as intended, as well as prepared the simulated partner subscriptions.

The judging panel comprised of Mr Eduard Fabian, Chief Technology Officer of Razer Fintech, Professor Pang Hwee Hwa, Dean of SMU School of Information System, as well as technology leaders and innovators from some of the event’s prominent sponsors including AWS, Mambu, PwC and Perx Technologies.

As winners of the competition, the SMU team will walk away with $8,500; each team member will also receive a RAZER™ BLACKWIDOW LITE STORMTROOPER keyboard. The team will be involved in a potential internship at, or collaborate with, Razer Fintech or its partners to turn its ideas into reality.

On why the team took part in this competition and what he has learned, Isaac Lee said, “The competition allowed us to challenge ourselves in figuring out solutions to problems that we were facing in our everyday lives. We had to overcome a huge time constraint to build a functioning prototype which we did successfully by making sure everyone was able to focus on what each of us did best. As the only business student in the team, I made sure that the rest of the team knew exactly what we were building and why. For me, I have learned a lot of new technical skills in integrating our backend servers in communicating with external APIs, launching our backend web service on AWS’s cloud services, and how to be more effective in managing a team under stress and time constraint.

“Unlike the competitions in normal times, we had to do things through Skype calls during the hackathon which meant that we had to take turns sharing screens to communicate what we were doing. Additionally, when it comes to exhausting competitions like this, long periods of silence without communication could mean someone might have fallen asleep. Hence having mutual trust, everyone pulling their weight, and constantly motivating each other were factors which contributed to our win in this competition,” added Isaac.

Photo caption: Isaac Lee Yi De (front), Randy Lai (left screen), Shao Shxuan (right top) and Clarence Pang (right bottom) communicated through Skype calls to brainstorm for ideas and solutions during the inaugural Razer Fintech Digital Hackathon. [Photo: Isaac Lee]