Oct. 3, 2013
ECE student Victor Zhang (ElecE 1T4) and his team called PayMint coded their way to victory in MasterCard’s N>XT Mobile Payments Developer Challenge hackathon on Sept. 28 and 29.
PayMint was selected by a panel of industry luminaries as the winning student team, an honour that came with a hefty $10,000 prize. Joining Victor on Team PayMint are Winston Zhang, Jeremy Wang and Michael Fok.
PayMint is a new wireless Bluetooth 4.0-enabled, proximity based mobile payment system. Using the app and MasterCard’s APIs, merchants can broadcast charges to shoppers, and those shoppers can send their payments instantly.
“PayMint solves the problem of the deficiency of current payment solutions in crowd situations,” says Victor. “It’s got real value to customers and merchants, and can be used in a variety of industries.”
The group is now going head-to-head with professionals and other student finalists for the CIBC People’s Choice Award, to be announced Nov. 1, 2013.
“I’ve participated in a few hackathons in the past but have never come first in such a major hackathon, so it was definitely a feeling of achievement and improvement,” says Victor. “My favourite part was working with friends into the night to transform ideas into reality.”
You can vote for Team PayMint on the MasterCard N>XT site.
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca