Pushing the limits of innovation for Alkami’s digital banking solutions

At our company, innovation isn’t just a buzzword—it’s embedded in our TechFin culture. This commitment to fresh ideas and creative problem-solving was on full display during our recent TechFin conference and internal hackathon, where teams from across the organization came together for a collaborative and rewarding 3-day event. This event was particularly special because Alkami recently celebrated its 15th birthday, which marked a major milestone in our commitment to growth and innovation. Keep reading for a recap of our TechFin conference and hackathon where teams across Alkami collaborated on projects to improve upon and advance the performance, processes and experience for Alkami’s digital banking solutions.

Setting the Stage at the TechFin Conference

The hackathon kicked off with a brief welcome session and keynote from Alkami’s Chief Executive Officer, Alex Shootman, and Chief Technology Officer, Deep Varma. For our fireside chat, we were honored to welcome our guest speaker, Nidhi Gupta, the CEO and co-founder of SheTO, an organization dedicated to empowering women in technology and leadership roles. Alongside Deep and Alkami’s Vice President, Learning and Talent Management, Erica Wakefield, Nidhi sparked an engaging discussion on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the tech industry, strategies for overcoming gender bias, and how organizations can build a culture that supports the growth and development of women in leadership positions.

Giving Back to the Community

As part of our 15th birthday celebration, the Alkami team partnered with Minnie’s Food Pantry for a team-building community service project aimed at combating food insecurity in the Plano, TX community. Alkami employees helped sort, pack, and distribute nutritious food to families in need. This partnership not only helped provide relief to those facing hunger, but also strengthened community ties and highlighted the importance of corporate social responsibility.

Ready, Set, Hackathon!

This year’s theme was “Innovate to Accelerate,” with a focus on creating features, solutions and tooling that would make our technology, development processes and digital banking solutions more performant, efficient, faster and scalable.

Hackathon Day: All Day Innovation

During this event, our Alkami headquarters in Plano, TX transformed into a buzzing hive of activity. Teams brainstormed, sketched out wireframes, wrote code, and tested prototypes. Some focused on improving existing features, while others set out to create entirely new ones. The energy was palpable as everyone pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in such a short time frame.

Demo Day: Showing Off Impressive Projects

After 24 hours of working on the hackathon projects, participants, judges and internal spectators gathered once more, to demo all of the projects that had been completed. Over 117 hackathon participants demoed 22 projects, and each team had just a few minutes to take the stage and present their project to a panel of judges, including a judge from one of our customers, Venky Annadurai, Vice President of Technology, Engineering and Development at Patelco Credit Union. During the demos, each of the teams explained not just what they built, but why they built these solutions, and how they could benefit our development teams, our financial institution customers, and their end users.

Announcing the Winners

As the anticipation built, it was time to announce the winners, with five exciting awards up for grabs, recognizing excellence across different categories.

Theme Award: Given to the project that best embodies the spirit of the hackathon’s theme, “Innovate to Accelerate,” by presenting a solution that significantly enhances speed, efficiency, or growth for our digital banking solutions.

• Winning team: Slack Support Bot / AI SevBot – The team built a smart, efficient Slack chatbot, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), designed to increase productivity and assist support teams by answering common questions related to troubleshooting, technical documentation, and other frequently asked queries. This project will also benefit impacted engineering team members by freeing up time for them to work on new projects and functionality.

• Team members: Ian Witecki, Ian Morgan, Alex Moreno, Brian Harboldt, Robbie Johnston, Jacob Hostler, Joshua Alfred, Austin Howard, Bob Brown, and Matt VanNatten

Innovation Award: Given to a project that demonstrates the most creative and original solution, recognizing a team’s ability to think outside the box and deliver cutting-edge ideas.

• Winning team: Risk Solution—This team built a risk solution that leverages artificial intelligence models to more effectively identify, assess, and mitigate potential financial risks.

• Team members: Max Kirkby, Leo Cedeno, Richard Soliman, Gabriel Lahman, John Crubaugh, Cameron Rodriquez, and Steven Yu

Special Jury Award: An accolade given to a project with unique qualities or outstanding creativity – in this particular event, was selected by Alkami’s Chief Executive Officer, Alex Shootman.

• Winning team: “ORB-less” Widget – The team built a widget entirely independent of the legacy Web Tier, using modern micro frontend technologies, to support Alkami’s web layer modernization efforts.

• Team members: Joseph Dalrymple, Justin Medas, Mohammed Ahmed, Chris Carrillo, George Faraj, Meareg Yalew and Jonathan Florentino

Technical Excellence Award: Highlights a project that has demonstrated exceptional technical innovation, selected by Alkami’s Chief Technology Officer, Deep Varma for its outstanding engineering and development potential.

• Winning team: Rewriting the Alkami Sidecar in Rust – In software development, a “sidecar” is a design pattern where a separate, co-located service runs alongside a primary application to provide supplemental functionality, such as logging, monitoring, or security, without altering the primary application’s code. This team rewrote the Alkami sidecar using Rust, a low-level memory-aware programming language, to free up memory when it’s no longer needed, greatly improving scalability efforts.

• Team members: Josh Long, Brent Morris, Nathan Brophy, and Justin Collins

People’s Choice Award: This award recognizes the project that the hackathon audience voted on as their collective favorite, celebrating the team’s creativity, innovation, and appeal among their peers.

• Winning team: Improving UI Test Automation with AI – This project leverages the latest AI technology to improve UI test automation needs and better exposes UI elements that are complex to identify. This project increases the speed of creating UI automation by writing test steps in plain English.

• Team members: Warren Ziegenfus, Steven Chau, Trent Whiteley, David Grandfield, Maxim Ashuev, and Sagar Dodia

Accelerating TechFin – One Team, One Mission, One Way

While the hackathon was a competition, it was also a collaborative effort that underscored our company’s commitment to innovation and continuous improvement for our digital banking solutions. Many of the ideas generated during the event are now being considered for further development, including the winning projects, which will be paired with an executive sponsor who will collaborate closely with the teams to refine their ideas and help bring these innovative solutions to production in the future.

Beyond the projects, the hackathon fostered a spirit of teamwork and creativity that will continue to influence our work long after the event ends. It was a reminder that when we come together with a shared purpose, we can achieve incredible things.

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