The University of Cape Town’s Financial Innovation Hub recently hosted a hackathon in collaboration with the Interledger Foundation, where students developed innovative solutions to real-world payment challenges in South Africa.
Hosted at the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking Africa at UCT, 12 teams comprising students from UCT, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), University of the Western Cape (UWC), and Eduvos participated. All are competing not just for a prize but for the opportunity to work with the Interledger Protocol (ILP) to create open-payment solutions for real-world South African problems.
“Hackathons allow students to create solutions for challenges that they identify in their lived realities,” says Dr. Allan Davids, Director of the Financial Innovation Hub. “The teams are made up of students from the Financial Innovation Hub alongside students from UCT and other higher education institutions studying disciplines such as computer science, computer and electrical engineering, and statistics.
They all work together as a team to develop technological solutions for real problems, each contributing their own learned skill sets into product-based technology. One of the solutions at the 2024 hackathon was so innovative it has been contributed back into the Open Payments Standard. So not only do Hackathons give students an opportunity to extend themselves in new ways, but they also provide the ecosystem with valuable contributions that further the mission and vision of a world where everyone can send a payment as easily as an email.”
Judged by Takunda Chirema and Si-Jia Wu, both former students of the UCT MPhil in FinTech, and Raul Ranete and Timea Nagy of the Interledger Foundation.
First place was Team Direla, which developed a QR code-based payment system for low-income users and retail partners, utilizing the Interledger Protocol. They also developed a USSD-driven platform for rural residents and a crowdfunding platform for students, enabling small transactions without point-of-sale devices.


Second was Team Fin Illuminaries with their USSD driven use of the Interledger Protocol to provide rural inhabitants with an alternative to ATMs by making digital financial services accessible through local spaza shops. Alongside this solution, the Interledger Wallet can also be used to make payments to small, informal businesses.


Third place was Team FlowFi with their crowdfunding platform for students. Their solution enables storytelling for the funded and the ability to match yourself as a funder with the individual. The use of the Interledger Wallet creates a unique incoming payment URL that tracks payments until the donation total is reached.


“At a Hackathon, we’re bringing together people that identify problems and solve them in a very short space of time,” says Ranete, a software engineer at the Interledger Foundation. “That builds community and courage, facilitates experimentation and encourages collaboration. As a judge, you’re sitting in the front seat of someone’s invented ‘car.’ You get to see the way that they process their argument, how they build it, what the data is behind it, and what the code engineering is. Y
You get to see new ideas and be surprised by the fact that something such as the Interledger Protocol and Open Payments could potentially be used in these left-field ways. As they use our software, they also point out to us what their needs and their community’s needs are. So, for me, it’s not just about judging; it’s about trying to take conclusions away and building a better piece of software.”
READ: Interledger Foundation Announces the NextGen Higher Education Grant