Inside Alkami’s 2026 Hackathon, where human creativity, AI, and a ticking clock turned big ideas into working digital banking experiences.

Sometimes, the best ideas start with a “Could we actually build that?” and a team determined to find out. That was the energy behind this year’s Alkami Hackathon.

From September 22–24, Alkamists, customers, and partners came together around one ambitious challenge: Build Your Own Banking.

The challenge was to reimagine relationship banking for the digital world. What could happen if a digital banking experience adapted to the person using it? Their needs, goals, behaviors, and financial journey. Teams set out to answer that question by creating hyper-personalized experiences powered by the Alkami Digital Banking Platform.

But there was another force shaping this year’s Hackathon: artificial intelligence (AI).

AI became part of the building process itself. Teams used AI to brainstorm, prototype, write and troubleshoot code, test approaches, and iterate faster. Work that once might have eaten up hours could move in minutes, giving teams more time to experiment and push their ideas further.

One Challenge. Two Locations. A Lot of Ideas.

This year marked an important first! Alkami’s Hackathon took place in the U.S. and India.

While teams were separated by thousands of miles, they were building toward the same goal which was to find new ways technology could make banking more personal, useful, and relevant.

Broader participation brought together diverse roles, backgrounds, experiences to form different interpretations of what it means to “Build Your Own Banking.” Some teams zeroed in on the customer or member experience. Others looked behind the scenes at the technology and processes that make those experiences possible.

Ready, Set…Hack

On September 23, it was go time. During the Hackathon, conference rooms and common spaces became temporary build labs. Whiteboards filled with diagrams. Teams huddled around screens. Ideas that sounded great an hour earlier got tested against reality, and occasionally sent right back to the drawing board. That’s part of the fun.

With AI helping accelerate tasks throughout the development process, teams could iterate at a pace that matched the Hackathon itself, fast. An idea could become a prompt, a prompt could lead to code, code could become a prototype, and a prototype could quickly reveal the next problem to solve.

And there were plenty of problems to solve. Teams built, tested, debugged, adjusted, and kept going. As afternoon became evening and evening became late night, the deadline got closer.

By morning, it was time to stop building and start pitching.

Three Minutes. One Demo. Go.

September 24 was Demo Day. After a day and night of building, teams had to do something that can be just as difficult as writing the code, showing everyone why their idea mattered.

One by one, teams took the stage to demonstrate what they had built. The variety was part of what made the demos so much fun. Teams tackled everything from AI-powered tools and personalized banking experiences to integrations, operations, security, and some of the less visible challenges that can have an outsized impact on the digital banking platform.

Judges had to make some tough decisions when it came to choosing the winners.

Meet the 2026 Hackathon Winners

This year’s winners showed just how many directions teams could take the Build Your Own Banking challenge. Across the U.S. and India, projects were recognized for technical excellence, customer impact, creativity, collaboration, and their potential to push digital banking forward.

U.S. Hackathon Awards

Trailblazer Award

Team: AI-Driven Core Mapping Studio

Team Members: Kurt Benthausen, Daniel Chung, Jake Lubben, Chun Huang, Ian Robbins, Smitha Donepudi & Rehaan Merchant

Project: AI-Driven Core Mapping Studio gives financial institutions and developers a visual, no-code way to customize how core banking data is mapped and used. An AI assistant makes the process even faster by translating plain-language business needs into recommended Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and field mappings, helping teams build personalized digital banking experiences without complex backend development.

Customer Delight Award

Team: Insight Engine

Team Members: Arash Didehbani, Mason McCray, Andrew Jarrett (TTCU FCU), Jeongmin Choi (Arrowhead Credit Union), Chris Gold (InvestiFi), Eric Brown (Oregon State Credit Union) & Jeffrey Hartman (Educators Credit Union)

Project: Insight Engine uses personalized account holder insights to assess an individual’s financial health and identify opportunities for more relevant guidance. By looking at factors like income, debt, and savings, it can surface targeted recommendations, from potential loan relief to smart investment opportunities.

Technical Excellence Award

Team: AI-Driven Analyze & Remediate

Team Member: Siva Mohan

Project: AI-Driven: Analyze & Remediate uses AI to help engineering teams respond faster when performance issues arise by analyzing slow endpoints and recent code changes to pinpoint potential causes. It then recommends performance optimizations that teams can test and deploy, helping shorten the path from incident to resolution.

Fan Favorite Award

Team: Magnet: More Needles, Less Haystack

Team Members: Justin Collins, Chris Hammons, Alex Lux, Jeremy Doss & Human AI-Faiz

Project: Magnet gives engineering and support teams a faster way to find the data they need when investigating issues, securely capturing third-party communications and key system actions in one place. By making those details easier to access, Magnet helps teams cut through the noise, troubleshoot problems faster, and reduce resolution times for financial institutions.

Fusion Award

Team: Card Compass

Team Members: Eric Byun, Ashley Megurdichian, Leigh Crowder, Trevor Brown, Chris Walker, Sean Boden & Elijah Hardin

Project: Card Compass is an AI-powered tool that takes the guesswork out of complex card integrations by quickly identifying which features, platforms, and integration paths are supported across different technology combinations. By analyzing the codebase and using AI reasoning, it gives teams clear, source-driven answers in seconds, helping financial institutions move from planning to launch faster.

TechFin Award

Team: Integration Hub

Team Members: Greg Billings, Micaiah Skolnick, Liam Petraska (NASA FCU), Patrick Mangan (REV FCU), Walter Kimrey (Skyla Credit Union), Keesina Reyes (Spokane Teachers Credit Union) & Mitesh Purohit (Amazon Web Services)

Project: Integration Hub gives financial institutions, partners, and Alkami teams one place to see and manage their integrations, settings, and enablement. From activating and configuring integrations to troubleshooting issues and receiving personalized recommendations, the tool makes managing an institution’s integration ecosystem simpler and more self-service.

India Hackathon Awards

Overall Winner

Team: Alkami opSense

Team Members: Ayush Singhal, Chirag Khanna, Manpreet Singh & Shivam Chaturvedi

Technical Excellence

Team: Business ACH – File/Batch Reversals

Team Members: Anand Singh, Deepak Kumar, Jai Kumar Jain, Shivam Saluja & Vivek Kumar

Trailblazer

Team: AEGIS – Alkami Engine for Gap Identification & Scoring

Team Members: Monica Rathod, Priyanka Nawal, Sachin Bhardwaj, Samir Jha, Santosh Kumar & Surbhi Deshpande

Fusion

Team: Saving Goals with AI (SmartSwipe AI)

Team Members: Faizan Mohammed Sajid, Abhijeet Chourasia, Harsh Goel, Puneet Sharma & Shrikant Pandey

Fan Favorite

Team: AlkaMind

Team Members: Yogendra Singh, Abhijeet Pandey, Kartik Parmar, Pranav Pandya, Raghavendra Singh & Aakshkumar Dubey

So, Why Do We Hack?

A hackathon is intentionally different from the normal rhythm of product development.

There is permission to start with a big idea, move quickly, test something that might not work, and collaborate with people you might not normally work with. That is particularly important when we’re thinking about the future of digital banking.

The most meaningful innovations often emerge when technical expertise meets real world banking experience. Developers bring the ability to build. Product and business teams bring context. Financial institutions bring a deep understanding of their customers and members. Partners bring new perspectives and capabilities.

Put those perspectives together, give teams a focused challenge, and something interesting happens.

Ideas become prototypes.

Prototypes become demos.

And sometimes, demos become the starting point for what comes next.

Beyond the Hackathon

To everyone who participated in the 2026 Alkami Hackathon, our Alkamists, customers, partners, judges, organizers, and everyone who stayed late to get a project across the finish line, thank you.

You brought the ideas, the questions, the creativity, and the persistence that made this year’s Hackathon possible.

To this year’s winners, congratulations on turning ambitious ideas into something you could put on stage and share with the broader Alkami community.

The challenge may have been to Build Your Own Banking.

The result was three days of experimentation, collaboration, and ideas for what banking could become.

That is the spirit behind Build Your Own Banking, giving financial institutions the flexibility to create digital experiences that can be more relevant, more useful, and more personal for the people they serve.

Ready to Build What’s Next?

The Hackathon may be over, but the building doesn’t stop here. With Alkami’s extensibility tools, APIs, SDKs, and partner ecosystem, financial institutions can create experiences tailored to the people they serve and bring their own ideas for digital banking to life.

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