Award Applications

Nationwide recently ran a sold out hackathon in Silicon Valley to promote and drive innovation across the industry. This hackathon focused on three business challenges.

- Connected Business - How can we use IoT to benefit small business owners holistically rather than with isolated or point "smart solutions"?
- Buying your First Home - How can we help people realize their dream of buying their first home?
- A Community On Your Side - How can we use digital capabilities to leverage community and create a network effect to ensure the right people get the right help at the right time?

We had 25 teams made up of 108 participants. All 25 teams presented concepts that were focused on the mentioned challenges. We awarded prizes to the winners of each challenge as well as a grand prize. Each winning team will have the opportunity to come to Nationwide and present to executives.

Grand Prize Winner
“Boost Pad” is a Rent to Own Housing solution. This concept allows renters to direct portions of their rent towards increasing their equity. It allows renters to move from property to property while maintaining that accrued equity. The app is integrated with Zillow, DocUsign, and Facebook, and the team intends to integrate with Nationwide to provide renters and/or mortgage Insurance.

Connected Business
“Flash Feedback” is a chatbot that leverages Alexa to allow customers to give real time feedback to a small businesses. The team used natural language processing, sentiment analysis and location awareness to direct the feedback to the proper business. The app also provides a real time dashboard with sentiment trends so the business owners know the tone of the feedback.

Buying your First Home
“Dream House” is an app that visually shows your “dream house” being built as you save money. The app uses housing market data to provide housing recommendations. It visual ally illustrate the sacrifices you may need to take in order to buy your dream house. (For example: you may need to eat Ramon Noodles in order to buy the house this year). It is integrated with your bank account so you can easily transfer money to your homes savings and continue building your dream home. It is integrated with Alexa so the user can ask how about their goal progress

A Community on Your Side
“Nationwide Buddy System” is an app that lets Nationwide members opt in to provide services like shelter, rides, food, water, etc. If anyone in a user’s area needs one of the services the opted in user is notified. The team used a graph database to identity the connection between the person needing the service and the person who is providing the service. The team assumes that the service could be used for any level of need, CATs, house fires etc.

This hackathon was well received by the community (NPS of 54%) as well as Nationwide executives and is being held up internally as a model for innovation.