INNOVATION HACKATHONS THE BANK ENTERS THE HIGH-TECH ECOSYSTEM Collaborating with the wider world to innovate better. In 2014, the Bank began holding “hackathons” to encourage creative exchanges with the world of high-tech. A hackathon is a collaborative programming event that gathers volunteer designers, developers and entrepreneurs around a given issue for a short, intense development session. For its first event, organised with Ecole 42, the private and free of charge IT school founded by Xavier Niel, the French IT and telecommunications entrepreneur, Societe Generale asked 170 participants, mainly students, to “reinvent the IT department of tomorrow” with solutions conceived “by developers, for developers”. Coached by employees of the bank, the teams worked for 48 hours before presenting projects centred on collaborative development. The winners received a trip to New York and computer hardware. Other hackathons have since followed this first success. 30 I SOCIETE GENERALE 2014-2015 Also in collaboration with Ecole 42, an “SG Connected Hack” brought together over 200 participants around multiple smart (connected) devices, to explore their potential uses in the bank’s insurance model. One of the five winning projects will be further developed by the IT department of the French retail banking arm. Entitled “Wearable Intelligent Banking”, it combines a smartphone, smartwatch, Google Glass and Apple iBeacon to streamline the process of receiving a client within a branch. At another hackathon, this time internal, 200 technicians from the Group’s IT department tried out working in start-up mode. Their challenge: supplement the Digital for All programme (see pages 32-33) by imagining new uses for the touchscreen tablets distributed to employees in 2015. Finally, a hackathon in Bangalore, India brought together a hundred students from approximately 20 Indian universities to “reinvent borderless bank branches for the digital era”. TALENTS OUTSIDE OF THE COMPANY ARE AN ESSENTIAL RESOURCE FOR INNOVATION www.societegenerale.com/hackathons RELATIONSHIP BANKING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
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