SWIFT has announced it will hold an open API hackathon at its annual African Regional Conference (ARC), taking place on 21-23 April in Cape Town, South Africa. The hackathon aims to identify new solutions to reduce costs in cross-border payments into and within Africa.

The hackathon is open to developers and engineers working in the financial sector who want to shape the future of Africa’s growing payments market. Over the two days, teams of developers will be given access to a combination of SWIFT and industry APIs in an open sandbox environment provided by SWIFT. They will be asked to develop solutions to concrete, real-world challenges currently facing the payments industry in Africa.

The teams will then pitch their work in front of an expert industry panel at ARC. The team that develops the most impactful solution will receive complimentary tickets to attend Sibos in Boston this October. 

All of the code produced by the teams will be published as open source, meaning it can be freely used by the African payments ecosystem to develop new solutions and services.

The hackathon comes at a time when the number of remittance payments going into and across Africa is increasing and value is moving across the continent more frequently than ever before. However, the current ecosystem is fragmented and according to the World Bank, the costs of cross-border remittance payments into and within Africa are higher than the global average. The hackathon will seek to address this challenge, using the latest API technologies and best developer talent to deliver new solutions that can be implemented across the continent. 

“Africa’s financial ecosystem continues to evolve with financial institutions increasingly partnering with fintechs, mobile providers, retailers and more,” said Sido Bestani, SWIFT’s head of Middle East, Turkey and Africa. “As the industry comes under pressure to reduce the frictions of cross-border payments, SWIFT is excited to bring together developers from across the continent to address this challenge.”