It was quite a rush last weekend to see a team at the first-ever FinTech Hackathon in New York City win the OANDA-sponsored US$500 prize for the most innovative use of the OANDA API.

The event brought together software developers, designers, and business managers in the banking/insurance/investing world to collaborate on finance-related software “hacks” over 24 hours.

(For the record, “hacking” is not breaking into a computer system to steal information. The more evolved context of hacking is to take some partially formed ideas and mash them together to produce something new.)

The winning hack built with the OANDA API is called GlobalFX. It’s a data visualization tool that uses an animated globe to provide forex traders with a visually interactive way to conduct comparative analysis of currencies over a specific time period. Developed by Isaac Hodes and Ben Gunderson, this hack is unique in that few visual exploratory data analysis tools of this kind currently exist. Even more exciting, the GlobalFX developers intend to build this tool into a fully-fledged product. We wish them luck!

Meanwhile, two other teams built interesting apps using the OANDA API.

One is called “FinCal”: a crowdsourced financial calendar that allows users to input and comment on financial events by the currency pairs they anticipate will be affected. The other, “Regression.io”, is a tool that allows traders to upload any data set they'd like, to analyze whether there is a correlation between their data and historical currency prices.

We'd love to see all three of these tools built using the OANDA API become publicly available for forex traders. Perhaps in due time they will, like OANDA’s fxTradeNOW browser extension, which eventually became a product after being conceived during one of our company’s internal Hack Days.

Overall, the competition among the 35 teams at the FinTech Hackathon was fierce but fun. A tip of the hat to the team that won the event’s grand prize for building a service that allows financial institutions to verify the identity of their customers without relying upon public record and credit data.

My colleagues Natalia Leibenzon and Alex Ianus joined me in New York and we had a great experience thanks to the large turnout. All of us at OANDA are keen to continue to support technological development in the financial services space, with a view to make financial transactions more efficient and easier to understand.

Did you attend FinTech Hackathon NYC or a similar event recently? What was your experience like? Please share your thoughts in the comment box below.