Welcome to the world’s first VRP Hackathon, powered by Ozone!

Open banking is transforming financial services, including the payments landscape, around the world.

Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) are an innovative new payment method, based on open banking, which allow a personal or business banking customer to give a regulated Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP) long lived consent to initiate ongoing payments within a set of parameters which define the value, frequency and payee account details. The PISP can then make recurring payments within these parameters, without the need for the customer to authenticate each payment with their bank. Not only is this model secure, it also allows for full transparency and control, whereby the customer can be automatically notified of each payment and can easily view and revoke consent at any time.

VRPs are set to be a major catalyst, enabling a broad range of use cases including frictionless, embedded consumer payments journeys and intelligent B2B payment solutions.

A number of UK banks are due to publish open APIs which support VRPs early next year, based on the latest UK open banking standards (https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/). In advance of this, the intention of this hackathon is to challenge the industry to bring to life the potential of VRPs and show the art of the possible.

To reflect the breadth of possibilities we have identified six categories as follows:

B2B payments
Make it easy for business banking customers to pay staff, suppliers or for government services (e.g. Tax).
Retail
Facilitate ‘one click’ payments to online merchants (including split and/or delayed payments) and/or point of sale in-store payments.
Subscriptions
Enable one off or repeat personal or business payments (e.g utilities, memberships, donations, etc) where the amounts might vary each time.
Sweeping
Automate the movement of money between accounts held by the same personal or business customer, to enable savings, investments, or loan repayments.
Peer to peer
Enable peer to peer payments (e.g. bill splitting, family allowances, etc) potentially including integration with online wallet(s).
Other
Any other use case not listed above, including automated payments from smart devices (e.g. speakers, cars, wearables, etc).

All you need to do is register, access the sandbox and show us what you can do!

Requirements

To enter, you need to build a fully working web and/or mobile app which provides a service in one of the above categories. We expect your app to clearly demonstrate how VRPs can deliver a significant improvement in security, accuracy and ease of use over and above any existing payment methods.

Your app can either be ‘stand alone’ or ‘embedded’ (e.g. in cloud accounting software or merchant solutions). In either case, it must connect to the Ozone Sandbox and use the VRP API to set up and make payments in this sandbox.

Your submission must include the following:

1. A PDF summary which covers:

problem statement which clearly states the pain point(s) you are solving, together with supporting evidence regarding the scale of the problem (including number of users, revenue potential, etc)
description of your proposed functionality and how this addresses the pain point(s)
technology used, including both software components (languages/technologies) and hosting architecture
high level business plan which demonstrates the market-readiness of your team/business, including how you will reach the end customers and how you will generate revenue and profit
credentials, including and overview of the team/business and a short bio for each key team member

2. A fully working demo web and/or mobile application (utilising the Ozone Sandbox), including:

relevant instructions so that the judges can try the app out for themselves
for web apps, a URL which can either be public or, if protected, a password must be provided
for iOS apps, test app must be provided via TestFlight or similar
for Android apps, test app must be provided as a downloadable APK file

3. A video (about 3 minutes) that must demonstrate your application being used and can also summarise the key points from your PDF summary. Videos must be uploaded to YouTube, or Vimeo and made either public or password provided.

We expect you to retain all IPR in the application you submit and thus do not require you to provide access to any source code.