BBVA API Market
During the South Summity held in Madrid in October, a powerful hackathon gave prizes to the teams which developed the most innovative solutions to the Travel-related challenge. The goal was to combine the potential of the technical tools from the different partners to create the most complete projects with solutions to transform the tourism sector.
We talked Esteban Simón, one of the members of the team (Spaces) which won the BBVA Award. This group proposed the “Comarch” project, an end-to-end mobility system used to manage the travel expenses and balance of a company’s employees in real time,” Esteban explained.
To this end, the team (Esteban, Ramiro Zandino, Jaime Fernandez, Mario Plágaro and Fabián Barrero) used BBVA’s APIs Business Notifications and Accounts. The business model is “Business to Business and the proposal consisted in handing BBVA debit cards to the employees so that the company could use the Accounts API to manage their travel balance, and the Notifications API to check the card expenses in real time and to set alerts and actions accordingly.”
Esteban and his team created a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in less than the 12 hours reserved for the development section of the hackathon. Typical of the most innovative software development schemes, this agility derives from the use of the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In fact, as stated by this young entrepreneur, the “APIs are often the starting point which triggers creativity and value propositions.” According to Esteban, APIs “are a basic pillar of most technological ideas, and facilitate a substantial reduction of the development time involved in the first MVP.”
All of this happened against a very hectic, quick turnaround work environment. “This type of event forces you out of your comfort zone. You have to start from scratch: you don’t know the members of your team or the challenge and, as such, you need to reach agreements, split the tasks because the time is limited and, lastly, sell the idea you’ve worked on for hours to a jury and convince them it is the best idea and you have all the answers,” he explained. And he summarized the experience: “Entrepreneurship compressed into one day.”
The final touch comes from the prize money, 1500 euros. Esteban will be investing his share in his own project “which, by the way, is also based on APIs”.
An API is a very useful mechanism that connects two pieces of software equipment to exchange messages or data in a standard format such as XML or JSON. Thus, it becomes an instrument that can be used to search for revenue, open the doors to talent or innovate and automate processes.
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