BNP Paribas Fortis Hackathons

One of the most important (and fun) jobs we have is to bring new light and fresh thoughts into legacy environments. As very early adopters of new trends and above all, new solutions, nothing gives us more pleasure than to showcase new solutions to old problems.

A very classic and impactful example of this has to be our series of hackathons we conducted at BNP Paribas Fortis around APIs, IoT and of course, AI.

Challenges faced by the BNP Paribas Fortis team

Preceding and preparing for the Open Banking shift, we had the opportunity of showcasing different forms of innovation through practical day-to-day implementations of new technologies. With our guidance, we’ve led completely non technical profiles to participate actively in understanding, implementing and interacting with the following topics:

Facial recognition

Utilising Raspberry Pis (one of our most beloved pieces of hardware) and Python (one of the most reliable pieces of software) the audience had the chance to get their hands dirty and assemble very basic facial-recognition-capable gadgets. Through pre-written OpenCV scripts delivered by Cyrex, we were able to successfully train the models and explore first hand the limitations, concerns but also the solutions this technology can bring.

IoT

The Internet of Things is an all-time interest of Cyrex. bringing software and hardware delivers a sci-fi vibe that is still largely untapped.

Kicking the challenge up a notch, we’ve assisted in creating intelligent speakers through Google’s AIY Voice Kits. These would eventually connect to Google’s assistant.

AI & NLP

Nicely connected to the last step, it was time to turn it up to 11. One of the earliest well known NLP and LLM references, Dialog Flow, has a very intuitive and visual way of configuring and training conversational AIs.

With this, we’ve successfully guided different teams into configuring a bot and finally integrating it with the voice kit, thus achieving a functional, albeit very rudimentary, assistant from scratch.

Result

Fear and suspicion of the unknown is one of the biggest causes for late adoption in many industries. This is of course even more impactful for industries where security is paramount, such as banking.

Cyrex proudly being one of the drivers in innovation, gladly takes the responsibility of informing and guiding both industries as well as individuals into the new ways of the world. Be sure to check out our recent projects for real world examples of how we drive innovation – and please feel free to get in touch with our team to discuss how we can elevate your next project.