“When we figured out we made the top three we were surprised!” “They’re [the hackathons] getting more competitive. Doing a lot of hackathons you get to know the community. We had to beat them out, we had to beat Ashwin and Yosun.” Brian recognizes skill when he sees it as he refers to beating out two skilled developers in the community that have won several hackathons.
Brian teamed up with Chris, Ali and Ruby to create Rapyd’s Rewards which became one of the top three winning teams for the Rapyd Hackathon: Galaxy’s Best Checkout.
In the Rapyd Rewards presentation video Chris (Brian’s teammate) explains, “Many of you are familiar with a checkout experience much like this [shows “Best Buy” branded example checkout page]. In some ways, you’re overwhelmed with options. You can use any credit card, Paypal, Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, you can have a series of codes to apply…”
“But what if there was a simpler way to select your card based on the type of purchase. And make it contextual to the purchase rather than leaving that up to the buyer every time?” says Chris.
Rapyd Rewards allows online shopping customers to view recommended payment methods based on the specific rewards or cash back bonuses related to the purchase. In addition, they can compare what kind of rewards they might get between different cards, or payment methods they own or those they don’t own yet.
Have you ever missed certain rewards you found after logging into your bank account or credit card portal to find any purchasing rewards that are unactivated or unused?
Rapyd Rewards is here to make it easier to decide how to purchase your products through prioritizing rewards-led purchases.
During the checkout, the customer selects the category of purchase (e.g. flight, hotel, electronics) and the payment methods or cards appear on the right to show the customer which of their own cards would work best for specific rewards related to the purchase. The customer can also switch on “show all cards” to display any cards that may have better rewards to make a purchase and immediately apply for that credit card or payment method.
Jumping in, Brian shared his excitement and discovery of Rapyd’s Hackathon and Greatest Fintech Series. “I was really excited for myself and my teammates. We were really hopeful in this challenge. We thought we put together something we really liked and we were really excited when we found out we got selected.”
Brian continued to share his experience of looking at the Rapyd’s API for payment methods, and the payment object. “The Rapyd hackathon seemed to have a good community around it, and resources for developers. Probably one of the biggest things is when my team and I were kind of discussing what to do with where you came up with an idea that we really liked. Sometimes based on a challenge we will just not really think of anything that we’re really excited about. This time we came up with something pretty early on in the discussion and we’re excited to build it.”
As a developer, future in-person would be something Brian would look forward to. “I would really enjoy any sort of in person events. Connecting in person is really enjoyable and Rapyd seems to have a platform that could support one pretty well. So any location-based or local hackathons would be very exciting to me.”
Brian also looks forward to what he thinks will be one of the most transformative technologies in the next 10 years. “The Technologies I think will be most transformative the one I’m most excited about along with probably a lot of people as any sort of anything pertaining to space travel 10 years maybe a little ambitious but if you never know what the way things are going to progress that that’s the one that I would be looking at most closely.”
Follow along with more hackathons and events in the Rapyd Developer Discord!