FinLit Hackathon Aimed to Improve Myanmar’s Financial Literacy Utilizing Digital Solutions

Yangon, Myanmar – February 13, 2019 – Yoma Bank, Oracle, and Phandeeyar aimed to improve Myanmar’s financial literacy by setting a financial literacy hackathon, FinLit Hackathon*, in Yangon from March 8th to 10th. Financial literacy is a valuable life skill that teaches you to understand basic financial concepts and to manage your personal finances. This is a valuable life skill for everyone. The organizers aim at bringing the emerging tech-and civil society community together in order to create tangible tech solutions fostering financial literacy in Myanmar.

The key objective of the FinLit Hackathon is to create digital solutions to educate financial literacy in youth, urban, rural, or older demographics. Many people in Myanmar are still not comfortable with financial institutions and this is due in part to the lack of financial literacy. This remains one of Myanmar’s most pressing challenges – a challenge that digital solutions are uniquely positioned to solve. “Improving financial literacy at scale is key to accelerating the development of Myanmar’s economy. At Yoma Bank, we can help Myanmar better access and participate in the Country’s financial system. Today, we are excited to partner with Oracle and Phandeeyar to launch the first FinLit Hackathon and look forward to exploring innovative solutions with Myanmar’s entrepreneurial tech community,” said Hal Bosher, Chief Executive Officer, Yoma Bank.

The FinLit Hackathon will also include three workshops hosted each week by Yoma Bank, Oracle, and Phandeeyar, which would ignite the interest and provide an explanation on the hackathon. The first information session will be led by Yoma Bank’s Head of Communication and Marketing, May Oo and Phandeeyar’s Tech Community Manager Htun Khaing Lynn on February 14th to provide the participants with hackthon information and problem statement. Use cases, in depth details of problem sets, and UX design sharing will be discussed during the second information session led by Yoma Bank’s Chief Digital Officer, Mark Flaming and Lead UX designer, Kyle Becker on February 19th, and the final information session will be led by Oracle’s Head of Solution Engineering (SAGE) Bernard Lim on February 28th. All the information sessions and the hackathon will be held at Phaneeyar’s offices 628/636 Merchant Road, (10th Floor, Royal River View Condo) Between 29th and, 30th St, Yangon.

Participants are also encouraged to form 3 to 5-persons teams. The problem statement that the teams will be solving is to hack and develop tangible tech solutions to educate the people of Myanmar from all walks of life on making informed and effective decisions when it comes to their financial resources. Sponsored by Yoma Bank, the winning team will win a cash price of US$1,000 while the runner up team will receive US$ 500 and the opportunity to attend Oracle OpenWorld Asia happening in Singapore from 26-27 March 2019**.

“Financial literacy is a skill that enables us to better manage our money, allowing us to anticipate problems and reach our goals. In this hackathon, Yoma Bank, Oracle, and Phandeeyar will gather the tech community to build digital solutions for empowering people in Myanmar to increase their capacity of handling their finance and, ultimately, live better lives”, said João Dutra (Kyaw Aung), Accelerator Director at Phandeeyar.

The applications developed from the hackathon will be built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle is proud to be the technology partner of the FinLit Hackathon as part of our overall commitment to the fintech community to promote financial literacy in Myanmar. As a leading cloud industry player, we are excited to contribute to this landmark event. These series of workshops and hackathon effectively showcase the power of Oracle’s next gen cloud infrastructure and we look forward to future collaboration opportunities with the fintech community in Myanmar,” said Cherian Varghese, Regional Managing Director, ASEAN.

*This event neither promotes nor permits coding activities designed to circumvent security functionality or exploit software vulnerabilities.

**Flight from Yangon to Singapore provided, along with two nights stay at hotel in Singapore is sponsored by Yoma Bank. **