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ElijahM
Advisor
Advisor
0 Kudos

A question that is often asked by those who are taking their first steps in to the world of Digital Transformation, is: "Where should I start?" What better way to answer that question, then by locking a group of coders in to a room, equipped only with their coding skills, a few pieces of software, an industry to work with, a deadline, and the incentive of Prizes?

This is exactly what occurred at the Frankfurt Bankathon, as previously mentioned in Martin Bachmann's blog The specified item was not found.. Coders were locked together in a room, put in teams, and given less than 2 days to come up with the most interesting and innovative app they could think of to help the Banking industry (not typically seen as the sexiest of industries), using various tools such as SAPs "Sentinel Cloud" API, API from comdirect, ASP, SQL, Swift, etc.

After the dust settled, it turned out that both the First and Second Place winners chose to use SAPs "Sentinel Cloud" API to create their Banking Apps!

Sentinel Cloud is a cloud-hosted API platform that provides a range of standardized (REST-based micro) services in the investment analytics space and algorithmic trading space including technical analysis, real-time backtesting, portfolio management, risk modeling, fundamental analysis, portfolio optimization and business news analytics. All access to these APIs is controlled by SAP API Management, and usage & API consumption reports will also be extracted through API Management.  The APIs provide access to high-quality market data and considerable IP in the areas of algorithmic trading strategies (with trade signal generation), portfolio optimization, fundamentals-based valuation models, deep text analysis (sentiment analysis, coreference resolution, topic extraction and news summarization), portfolio management, etc.

It is no wonder that the winning Apps made use of this powerful cornucopia of data!

First Place

Cocktail Trade

Photo Credit: www.bankathon.net

In order to assist both novice and power users, Cocktail Trade intends to provide recommendations of Stock Trades, to assist users in figuring out what companies to look at in their area of interest. Overwhelmed by the number of companies available to trade, Cocktail Trade allows the user to search for a field of interest (such as Auto industry), and the App recommends the "Top companies" using sentiment analysis, and a portfolio of company metrics. It doesn't stop there however, because in this age of Big Data, it makes sense to use both historical data, as well as Predictive Analytics to predict trends, and make suggestions about the best times to make trades on companies, which the SAP Sentinel Cloud API via SAP API Management provided. Very cool!

SECOND PLACE

BestInvest

Photo Credit: www.bankathon.net



Simplification of investment seems to be a theme of those using SAP, another team using SAPs Sentinel Cloud API exposed via SAP API Management, BestInvest created a google-like experience, with a search engine for financial products. In only 3 steps, a potential investor can determine the area of investment interest, their profile expectations, and their personal investment preferences, to yield the top 3 best stocks to invest in. Using the SAP Sentinel Cloud product, Best Invest pulls historical and predictive information about stocks in real-time, and provides information needed to weight metrics such as running costs, company performance, and others, to give the investor the best choices.

Many other cool solutions were created to help us all become rich, using a host of tools, including the SAP Sentinel Cloud API. If you would like to find out more information about these solutions, you can read about them in the Bankathon Summary here. If you'd like to see the App developers presentations for a deeper look at what the Apps were designed to do, you can find a recording here.


A very cool example of how APIs can enrich and enhance Applications, even in a tradtional industry such as Banking. The answer to the original question seems to be that you can do anything!

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If you would like to try "Sentinel Cloud" API yourself, or find more information about it, go here: https://www.sapservicesinnovation.com/bankathon2015-de and then let us know about it!