On May 15th team Velocity took part in the joint K2 UiPath Hackathon hosted at K2’s head office in Weybridge, UK. The invite only event was attended by a guest list of select K2/UiPath technology partners.
What is a Hackathon?
In UiPath’s words [1] a Hackathon literally meaning ‘hack marathons’– hackathons were born back in the 90’s as solution seeking challenges for enthused computer professionals. While they began in the realm of software programming, hackathons have recently been appropriated by the corporate world as part of a ‘gamify to innovate’ paradigm – the ‘Like’ button was invented at an internal Facebook hackathon – and can involve participants from various backgrounds. Business developers, graphic designers, or even sales people are being drawn into this ‘maker’ culture that is chiefly characteristic of techies. What’s great is that hackathons promote doing over talking, and it’s precisely why the business world is so eager to adopt them.
The K2, UiPath Hackthon was developed as an educational tool to bring together community expertise to further educate and award in a light/fun way and provide the opportunity for networking and sharing excellence.
The 6-hour joint partner Hackathon challenged participants to developing a low-code workflow solution blended with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to improve user experience for a B2C scenario which K2 and UiPath referred as ‘Couch to Credit’.
The ‘Couch to Credit’ business scenario
The scenario presented a customer wishing to apply for a new credit card. The customer’s aspiration was to do this from the comfort of their couch and receive a rapid response approval of their application.
The value add for the customer in this scenario was that the software driven solution needed to provide a seamless improvement on the current 2-day acceptance/up to 14-day Know Your Customer (KYC) approval process, and present a improved user experience. The Business ROI of this scenario needed to demonstrate the reduction in human intervention/approval process, and subsequently reduction in resource-to-task with the end goal of liberating the current human worker from having to carry out the manual checks.
Considering that the application process for credit approval is rules and data validation based, this business scenario presented a perfect application for the K2 low-code workflow to collaborate with an intelligent automation using the UiPath RPA software.
The hackathon comprised of two build sessions that culminated in each participant presenting a live demo of their workflow and automation solution. Each team had access to pre-built integrations and components to support the task and had the option of including as many or as few as they deemed appropriate to win the task, the integration and pre-built RPA ‘bots’ included the following:
Data sources:
- Azure AI Credit Checks
- Experian Credit Checks*
- Facial Recognition API*
- ID Check API*
- eSignatures
Pre-built UiPath ‘robots’:
- Google Search
- Credit History
- Default Loans
The Winning Demonstration
On the day, the demonstrations were presented to a judging panel of K2 and UiPath experts, with team Velocity IT being crowned with the winning solution. The Velocity solution, which provided a low code plus RPA prototype utilised the above indicated (*) resources as well as the following technologies that were developed by the team during the event:
- K2 SmartForms – for the user to provide application documents and information
- K2 workflow – to facilitate the steps in the process and initiate the robot to carry out the validation checks
- Driving Licence OCR Robot – Velocity built recognition software bot to read and extract Driving Licence data for use in identity verification
- ID Validity Checks Robot – Velocity built id verification bot
- Address Verification Robot – Velocity built address checker bot to cross check with electoral register data source.
Velocity CEO, Arno Van Rooyen said “I was delighted with the team’s efforts at the K2 UiPath Hackathon, further strengthening the expertise we already provide to combine process automation solutions using UiPath & K2 for our clients. This win demonstrated our aptitude for delivering a rapid automation solution combining the two software platforms, that also pushed the boundaries of integrations beyond those available on the day”.
Reference [1] https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/the-hackathon-challenge