KUWAIT: National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) strives to provide top-notch digital services to its customers by continuously developing all its digital channels. In this context, the bank honored the winners in the 'NBK Online Hackathon', organized in partnership with CODED academy, with the aim of delivering new ideas and innovations to develop in NBK mobile banking.

The prizes were distributed to the winning teams in a ceremony organized by NBK, in the presence of the bank's jury panel Mohammed Al-Othman, Head of Consumer Banking Group, Nikolaos Sfikas, Head of Group IT, Mehmet Darendeli, Head of Group Strategy, Mohammad Al-Kharafi, Head of Group Operations and Ahmad Marafi, CODED CEO and Co-Founder, and Jason Jiang, General Manager of Huawei.

Mohamed Al-Othman, Head of Consumer Banking Group at National Bank of Kuwait presented the prizes to the winning team named 'Olympus' which ranked first and received KD 2,500 prize, whereas 'Coffee Addicts' and 'ta git' teams came second and third, respectively, and received valuable prizes from Huawei.

In this Hackathon held from 24 to 26 June, 2021 saw the participation of 25 teams of FinTech programmers, of which 15 teams completed their projects successfully with ready-to-present functional prototypes, which were evaluated and three winning teams were announced.

On this occasion, Mohamed Al-Othman said: "We are keen to build strong relationships with the digital community and Kuwaiti youth, in line with our endeavors to maintain digital excellence as a key objective of all our strategies and operations."

"This competition witnessed introducing many innovative ideas that support our strategic digital transformation goals, and reflect Kuwaiti youth's efforts to achieve financial inclusion goals, and promote the saving culture." Othman emphasized that NBK will continue to provide cutting-edge digital products and services, as part of the bank's endeavors to offer its customers a richer banking experience.

On a related note, NBK's Digital Office received the Best Financial Innovation Lab Award in Kuwait for 2021 in the annual survey conducted by the international Global Finance magazine, based on the input from a large panel of experts, analysts, consultants and corporate executives around the world.