NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Citi® and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a collaboration to work with developers and build the next generation of financial technology (FinTech) through the Citi Mobile Challenge. IBM will offer mentorship tutorials, and access to Bluemix, IBM’s digital innovation platform, to help developers participating in the Citi Mobile Challenge build, test and deploy their FinTech solutions. Citi Chief Client Experience, Digital and Marketing Officer for Global Consumer Banking Heather Cox and IBM Fellow and CTO Jerry Cuomo made the announcement at IBM InterConnect 2015, IBM’s major cloud and mobile conference.

Citi Mobile Challenge is a global virtual competition that launched in 2014, first in Latin America and then in the United States to bring together the most innovative developers and leading technology sponsors to build a unique, global developer ecosystem. Through the Challenge, Citi has worked with more than 165,000 developers across six continents in 62 countries. From the inaugural Challenges, Citi has selected 23 top innovations and is working with several of the teams to bring solutions to market. Citi also announced today the launch of the next Citi Mobile Challenge in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“IBM’s recognition that the Citi Mobile Challenge is fostering the development of the next generation of FinTech solutions serves as great validation of our efforts to accelerate and lead digital innovation,” said Citi’s Cox. “More importantly, the platform of development tools IBM will make available to Challenge participants will go a long way towards helping them turn their creative ideas into innovative realities.”

“The Citi and IBM collaboration represents a unique opportunity for developers to create innovative financial services solutions. The IBM Cloud Platform and industry APIs enable developers to quickly innovate mobile solutions for their personal banking clients offering them new services on their mobile devices like never before,” said Sandy Carter, general manager, Cloud Ecosystems and Developers.

Registration for the Challenge is open February 23 through March 6, and selected participants will demonstrate their concepts at events in Nairobi on April 22, Jerusalem on April 26, Warsaw on April 28, and London on April 30. A panel of industry experts and financial technology leaders will evaluate the solutions at each event. Finalists compete for an opportunity to take their technologies into production with Citi’s support, plus a share of $100,000 in cash awards and a suite of services from Citi Mobile Challenge sponsors.

Bluemix runs on SoftLayer cloud infrastructure and combines the strength of IBM’s middleware software with tools from IBM’s partner ecosystem to offer DevOps in the cloud. With access to services and APIs from across the tech industry – including tools in categories such as Watson, open source and third-party tools including services for social, mobile, security and the Internet of Things – Bluemix helps developers speed application deployment from months to minutes.