WholisticTeam: National Champion & Regional 1st Runner-Up

WholisticTeam, a team of four final year students of the International Business Management program from Petra Christian University, Indonesia, was crowned 1^st Runner-Up of the Fintech category in the CIMB 3D Conquest Grand Finale held in Kuala Lumpur last Friday (18/1). Previously, the team won the National Champion title in the competition’s In-Country Indonesia round. The four students are Fetricia Magdalena Bunanta, Jessica Halim, Patrick Giovanni Wongsosaputro, and Kenny Natanael Tandra.

CIMB 3D Conquest is the inaugural hackathon-style competition open to university students across ASEAN with three categories: Fintech, Coding, and Data Science. The hackathon’s partners include Cloudera and Fusionex for the Data Science track, SAS Malaysia and Amazon Web Services for FinTech and Oracle Malaysia for Coding. Malaysia Airlines is the Official Airline for the fourth consecutive year in supporting CIMB's youth development initiatives. The event is also supported by digital content portal Disruptive Tech Asean. The competition began on September 18, 2018, with 715 participating teams from 200 universities across 9 ASEAN countries. Subsequently, 213 teams from seven countries made it to the In-Country stage of the competition held in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. At the Grand Finale, a total of nine teams were selected as winners. The Champion teams from each track won a total of US$8,000 as well as a trip to Silicon Valley , and all finalists received standing job or internship offers from CIMB.

In achieving their victory, WholisticTeam’s journey was a very challenging yet exciting one. Starting from an idea proposal and pitch deck online submission to create an innovation for a future banking experience; the team hustled their way to the In-Country level Hackathon where they pitched how to bring their idea to life to a selected panel of judges and finally won against 32 other teams from Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Cambodia with their idea of an app to solve the current banking industry’s problems in customer retention. “We pitched twice – first for five minutes in a small room to three judges, then for 10 minutes on the stage in front of everyone, as one of the top five teams. They didn’t announce which teams were going to do a second pitching until literally the second just before we had to go up and do it,” says Patrick. “I think that made for a very nerve-wracking but memorable experience.”

After winning the In-Country level of the competition, the next stage for WholisticTeam was pitching in the Regional level Grand Finale with other In-Country top 5 winners, now including teams from Malaysia, Indonesia,Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. This time, teams were also required to demonstrate a working prototype of their idea. Adding more to the challenge, an “X-Factor” was introduced on the day of the competition, which teams are required to work into their solution during the 22-hour Hackathon. Following the previous stage’s format, all teams are to make a five-minute pitch before the top three teams are called to pitch in front of judges and all participating teams of the Fintech track.

“What’s so great about this competition is the amount of exposure you get to industry players. Also, the learning is exponential,” says Jessica. During the process of developing their idea, teams were mentored by CIMB’s very own Digital Product Development team. All presenting teams also received valuable insights from their pitching rounds’ Q&A session with judges from CIMB’s management; Indonesian Fintech players such as Go-Jek, Modalku, Amartha, Bukalapak, Kudo, Cermati, and Pembayaran Digital Indonesia; and CIMB Group’s partners.