The Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC) recently made available the demos of its first FDITECH Sprint, a contest held in September that focused on reaching unbanked customers via fintech solutions. The winning ideas included those that leverage technology to provide loans to small businesses in underserved communities; offer savings accounts and financial education for minority youth; and reduce the cost of reaching unbanked customers with a packaged digital tool for community banks and credit unions.

Justin Cole, who heads the FDITECH Sprint program from the FDIC Office of Innovation, told Bank Automation News that the sprints are designed to gather external stakeholders together for a problem-solving session of three to five weeks in length. During the most recent tech sprint, teams learned more about the FDIC and its challenges of importance, developed ideas and solutions around the challenges, and then tested their ideas.

“We will put out a problem statement, one that is kind of collaboratively developed within the FDIC, a pressing urgent challenge that we might be experiencing,” Cole said. “Different teams will self-organize … they will prepare an initial idea of how they might respond to it.”

The tech sprint culminates with a demonstration day during which the teams showcase what they’ve accomplished during the allotted time period. While the FDIC does not offer prizes, the competition is judged by several federal agencies.

A total of eight teams participated in the first sprint. Three winners were announced but without details about what the teams had presented. The demos, which posted in mid-November, give viewers a look at the teams’ presentations and new offerings, including the three winners:

• Team OnRamp, composed of employees from Amazon Web Services, digital banking platform Narmi and digital core solution Galileo. The team won in the Effectiveness/Impact category by offering an integrated turnkey solution that banks and credit unions could white label — with a supporting national market campaign and a partner ecosystem — to onboard unbanked customers at a cost of less than $9 per user per month, with the cost lowering as the user base grows. The team said it will partner with financial institutions to launch as pilots in 2022.
• Team Goalsetter, led by Goalsetter CEO and founder Tanya van Court, a former Nickelodeon executive. The team won for creativity after presenting how the Goalsetter app could be used to reach black and Latino youth to grow the next generation of savers and investors.
• Team NAAC-Talino Finance, led by the National Asian American Coalition and Talino Venture Labs, a venture studio for fintechs. The team won for market readiness with its proposal to offer small business loans in underserved communities via a digital mobile lending platform.

The FDITECH Sprints are designed to solve challenges related to the safety and soundness of financial institutions, but also issues related to consumer protection and inclusiveness, Cole told BAN.

“Our first one on inclusion and our second one on resilience, certainly has much broader implications even beyond the FDIC,” Cole said. “Tech sprints acknowledge that we are but one player, we are but one part of a larger ecosystem of fintechs, nonprofits, banks, advocacy groups, other federal regulators — all working together as a part of a broader ecosystem.”

The second FDITECH Sprint, which was completed in October, focused on helping banks to measure and test resiliency with six participating teams. The demos have not yet been published but the winning entries were:

• Team Data Society, formed by the Data Society, an AI solution provider, and Google, which won for creativity.
• Team GRF Operational Resilience Assessment, formed by the nonprofit group Global Resilience Federation and cybersecurity firm Secure Digital Solutions Inc., won for effectiveness/impact.
• Team Tandem, formed by the information security and compliance firm Tandem and CoNetrix, a computer networking, security and compliance firm. The team won the market readiness award.