ICICI Bank launched a virtual mobile app development challenge hosted on the IBM Cloud platform. Its India’s largest mobile app development initiative by a bank. Christened ‘ICICI Appathon’, the programme aims to attract developers, technology companies, startups, technopreneurs and students to create the next generation of banking applications on mobile.

Hosted on the IBM Bluemix cloud based platform, ‘ICICI Appathon’ will offer a diverse set of over 50 APIs from ICICI Bank and its group companies namely ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, ICICI Lombard General Insurance and ICICI Securities. As a first, payment APIs from ‘Visa’ and the ‘Unified Payment Interface’ API from NPCI will also be available for the app development challenge. Using these APIs, participants will have to create innovative working prototypes of mobile applications that provides a superior customer experience.

Three ‘ICICI Appathon’ champions will be selected by a jury of eminent leaders from the BFSI segment and startups. All participants will be judged on five criteria that include uniqueness, functionality, business potential, user experience and scalability.

The top three winners will win prizes from a pool of over INR 20 lakh along with a potential engagement opportunity with ICICI Bank. They will also be given a chance to be mentored by the event partners. Additionally, winners of the ‘ICICI Appathon’, who apply to the ‘10,000 Startups’ of NASSCOM will get a fast tracked entry into it. Moreover, two members of the winning team shall also have access to the network and coworking community of 91springboard (a co-working community of freelancers, startups and established small to large businesses) across India.