Payments-As-A-Service — The Hackathon Way

The best way to generate a new idea?

Assemble a lot of new ideas, a gaggle of talented developers and challenge them to put their skills to the test to determine how those ideas can be — or if they should be — brought to market.

Easier said than done, of course, but this was the marching orders as Cayan kicked off its third annual hackathon. As Dominic Lachowicz, SVP of engineering at Cayan, told PYMNTS, the best way to make sure that Cayan is always on the cutting edge of new ideas is to take a break from the tedium of digital development tasks and take the team outside their box and into what could be the next big thing in payments innovation.

The team had a high bar to hurdle. The fruits of the 2015 hackathon’s labors included machine-learning algorithms that could detect signature fraud, consolidated APIs for use by independent software vendors and a program to automatically release database fixes for more reliable security and performance.

PYMNTS caught up with Lachowicz to see what happened when 55 engineers across two continents over two days traded in their developer caps and became hackathon masters.

PYMNTS: Tell us a little bit more about the concept behind the hackathons and what came out of the two-day event?

Lachowicz: Our hackathons are really one of the great ways Cayan is able to showcase our culture and our creativity and the fantastic engineering we have here. We have about 17 different projects being worked on by teams on both continents ranging the full gamut. Some teams were focused on improving developer testing tools, others on improving productivity. We had teams that were mining the wealth of information that we have about customers, items that were purchased and really some neat visualization tools — mashing up our data with tools like Google Maps to come up with new data products and capabilities.

Our product management team is pouring over about a half a dozen ideas spurred on by this year’s hackathon that will take us into new and exciting directions. A lot of the development and testing improvements are finding their ways into our teams’ backlog already.

PYMNTS: How do you decide on what challenges to put in front of the hackathon teams? Were these things that came out of conversations with clients, or are these things that you had put on your roadmap and wanted to accelerate?

Lachowicz: That’s one of the great things about the hackathon is it’s really meant to spur developers’ creativity. We do provide a little guidance, but all of the projects really were their teams coming up with their own ideas and fleshing them out.

Some of them were personal itches that they wanted to scratch. Some of them were cool mashups from existing products that we think can help us deliver a better payment product to the market. Regardless — it’s all them.

PYMNTS: Are there areas of concentration or common denominators that these projects also touched? Are there areas of focus?

Lachowicz: There were about five different projects that were focused on developer and testing tools here that would really help our developers and testers accelerate the pace of development and help them find issues sooner, quicker, faster. We did have three different products that focused on machine learning, data mining and visualization — taking information about merchants that came on board in the past year.

In one of our previous hackathons, a developer looked at signature fraud analysis. Because our Genius product captures signature and the U.S. is using magstripe transactions, as well as with the chip cards with signatures, we can capture a cardholder’s signature from transaction to transaction and perform some similarity analysis there. We have a possibility to detect if signatures don’t match. We’re still evaluating if it makes sense for that product to go to market, but it’s just one of the examples of how creative our teams can be.