Money20/20 hackathon

by | Oct 28, 2014 | Payments

money2020 2014

The Kill Bill team will be in Vegas next week for Money20/20 and we will be participating in the Money20/20 Hackathon. There are 9 different challenges to pick from, and we’ve been hard at work thinking through which one to work on.

Let’s review the options:

PayPal: Kill Bill has been supporting PayPal since day 1 via the Kill Bill PayPal plugin. It’s currently used by Ning in their checkout flow: when you select the PayPal option, you are redirected to the PayPal hosted page to accept the billing agreement (BAID). Once accepted, PayPal redirects you to Ning to setup your network, while Kill Bill sets up a payment method associated with this BAID in the background. This payment method will be used for recurring billing. Given our recent work on pure payments (highlight of the latest 12 release), it would be a natural fit to pursue that challenge and offer a deeper integration with mobile APIs and the PayPal wallet.

Modo Payments: We currently do not have a Modo payment plugin, so this would be the perfect opportunity to expand our list of supported Gateways. More importantly, Modo is doing a lot in the loyalty points space: we could as part of this challenge expand the credit support in Kill Bill (CBA) to work with external points systems (think of the airline miles system, how you earn and redeem them on shopping portals).

Mercury: Similarly to Modo Payments, we do not have a payment plugin for Mercury either. This would give us also the opportunity to work with retailers and POS systems. While Kill Bill is mostly used for Card-non-present transactions, few people realize that it supports Card-present scenarios as well: the track data can simply be passed as plugin properties to the plugin, similarly to the cryptogram for Apple Pay (which we support through CyberSource today).

MasterCard: We’ve been integrated in the MasterCard network through many payment gateways for many years. This challenge would give us the opportunity to go one step further and do a direct integration with MasterPass, their digital wallet.

Intuit: As an open-source project, we’re a very attractive subscription billing and payments platform for startup and small business owners, most of whom are likely to use QuickBooks. Integrating deeply with QuickBooks would help them with reconciliation and simplify their analytics and reporting.

Feedzai: Our recent 12 release opens the door to very exciting topics around payments, including payment routing and fraud detection. Most payment gateways include fraud detection modules so we haven’t spend much time integrating with external fraud detection systems. This would give our merchants an additional layer of security and mitigate the risk of chargebacks, therefore reducing their fees.

Chain.com: We’ve been natively supporting Bitcoin for a while now, but this requires to run a SPV node locally on your servers. Integrating with the Chain API would simplify the deployment, since we could simply register Kill Bill to listen to their webhooks. No more firewall fiddling!

Blockchain: While we support both Coinbase and BitPay, we’ve never had the opportunity to integrate directly with Blockchain.info. This would be a nice addition to our list of support Bitcoin gateways.

Bionym: Nymi is the next generation of devices focused on identity protection. Kill Bill can already integrate with traditional systems for authorization and authentication (LDAP, ActiveDirectory, etc.). This challenge would help get us to the next level!

We are definitively not lacking options given the versatile aspect of the Kill Bill platform. We need to be careful though, as the demo will only last two minutes, with an extra minute for questions — we don’t want to expand on too many features, as we will never fit in our time slot. It’s a nice but difficult position to be in…

What do you think? Is there anything you’d like us to go after specifically?

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