This October, 95 teams competed in the Money 20/20 Hackathon. 36 of these teams committed to building with Visa APIs, addressing Visa’s challenge of re-imagining the Smart City of Tomorrow. Each sponsor was tasked to choose two teams to move to the final round. Team Switch impressed the Visa judges and landed one of the two coveted spots.
The team of four are no strangers to hackathons; Switch won the MIT Fintech Hackathon in 2016. This prompted Visa to extend an invite to Switch to compete in Las Vegas for Money 20/20. Good thing they did, as the team not only moved on two be Visa Challenge Runner Up but landed a spot in the Top 10 Overall Money 20/20 Hackathon Winner spot (taking home $5K).
Team Switch is actually a startup based in NYC. We sat down with the team to learn more about their startup, hackathon idea, and what’s next.
What is Switch Benefits?
We have been working on Switch since we were in grad school at Cornell Tech. We decided to take a look at how we can use and customize existing financial products, such as different types of lending, credit, or insurance products, to better fit the needs of the freelance economy. By freelance economy, we are referring to people who primarily, or in some significant form, earn income through a number of online marketplaces. We conducted research into the problems, opportunities, and challenges faced by this demographic and isolated a few problem areas that we have been working on.
We are building out a product that enables freelancers to have better management over their income by using contextual information from the marketplace they work on. We are going to connect with them with custom financial products and service partners that we hope to work with in the near future.
Where did the idea for Switch come from?
In the fall of 2016 we were working on a research project and the research highlighted challenges related to income volatility and the cost of self-insurance faced by freelances. The way that evolved into a specific product was an evolution of continued research and costumer discovery that identified invoice factoring as potential starting point for us to go-to-market.
Then we progressed to identify a platform based approach where we are transacting with people who earn money on specific gig economy marketplaces. The marketplaces take care of invoicing and collections, allowing us to be efficient.
How did you tie it in to the Smart City challenge?
For the Hackathon, what we built and what we adapted our overall vision of the company was a broader understanding of income sources in the future. When you look at smart cities you’re not simply looking at smarter infrastructure but also at how the smart infrastructure enables different income sources or highlights income sources that today might be a very small percentage of people’s income in a much bigger way. When you have greater automation, self-driving cars, robots, drones and things of that nature, you are going to have people relying on a whole different suite of sources of income.
What we demoed at the hackathon included revenue from home sharing and car sharing that in the future when everyone’s cars are being used in a wider network and function as taxis when they are not in use, will contribute more substantially to an income mix or when you look at renewable energy sources that are tied into a smart grid that earn money for you. All of these need a better way to be managed and they need much deeper contextual understanding so they can be used to qualify you for a variety of different financial products.
When you read the Visa challenge, was that a natural direction for your established company vision?
It wasn’t directly something we had been thinking about but when we considered a longer term vision of where the company could be, and how the company needs to think about the future, it made a lot more sense. Wen you think about the smart city the first thought everyone has is the infrastructure but there is so much more to it. It’s not just expressways, its checkout terminals, automation, alternative energy sources.
How was the Hackathon experience?
When we started Saturday morning we spent a lot of time trying to get more clarity around the idea. Part of that process involved speaking with the Visa team and their advisers, and their Marqeta team who proved to be a very essential part of our process for the next day.
We didn’t really have any gauge of the others in the hackathon room. We spent time preparing and ironing out what we wanted to demo. Then we spent the rest of the time splitting design work, the pitch, and engineering work between the four of us. We identified where we needed help, whether it was from one of the resources that Visa brought along or the product managers at Marqeta.
What Visa APIs did you and how did that enhance the idea?
We used the Visa Direct API; we used it in a product demo where we wanted to showcase funds being transferred from a third party financial institution to our customer. The ability of the Visa Direct API to complete the transaction in very efficient and just in time way enabled us to add and support functionality that otherwise wouldn’t have allowed the product to make a lot of sense.
How did the Marqeta APIs help?
The Marqeta APIs were critical to the development of our hackathon demo, and more broadly have given our entire company’s product roadmap an overhaul. The product’s capabilities allow us to aggregate these various income sources and distribute them to our customers in a seamless way. We can also easily integrate various locks and rules on the account, that enable us to create financial products that are not possible today. We were fortunate to have been able to work so closely with them and are continuing to engage with them to integrate their product into Switch, so we can execute ideas that we had pushed back further in our company’s direction.
How did you find the Visa Developer Platform?
The documentation was easy to follow and to understand what tools are available to accomplish tasks. They had an exhaustive set of resources that enable building a whole host of functionality with respect to payments.
Thoughts on the Visa support on-site?
Visa had support and resources on-site that included designers, engineers, product managers, and business heads who we pitched a few ideas to. They were great sources for feedback after which we went back and iterated on what we were considering. We worked with the Visa team to understand how some of the ideas fit into long term, broader vision or plan, and what are the things we need to consider important. Such as what areas are opportunities versus risks.
Being heavily integrated the payment infrastructure and financial services space, they were able to give us a lot of insight into different opportunities in the market and economy, and help us understand what cities of the future could look like. How do companies view smart cities, beyond the obvious.
