TrueHack 8: are you afraid of the cards?

TrueLayer, like any scaling fintech, has one constant — and that’s change.

But one thing that doesn’t change, and has remained a key milestone on the calendar every year since our inception, is the annual edition of TrueHack. TrueHack is our internal hackathon that runs for 24 hours and involves lots of coding, surprisingly competitive mini games and plenty of pizza.

Each year, teams are assembled from across our offices — bringing together just about every department — to compete in a themed event at our London HQ.

At its heart, TrueHack is more than just an internal hackathon. It’s a celebration of creativity, innovation, and collaboration. We host TrueHack to give everyone a platform to explore new ideas, challenge themselves, and break out of their day-to-day roles.

This year’s theme

In its very first edition back in 2017, started by TrueLayer’s founders Luca and Francesco, TrueHack’s theme was centred around our Data API product. In recent years, themes have ranged from changing the way the world pays to building a defensible moat.

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This is my favourite day of the year!

Luca Martinetti, TrueLayer's CTO and Co-Founder

This year’s TrueHack, still proudly championed by Luca and Francesco, was inspired by the famous Goosebumps series. It revolved around how the transformative role of AI could help improve internal tooling and customer facing features/products, to ultimately increase Pay by Bank’s share of checkout, as we take on the scary incumbents.

What were the judges looking for?

As well as an audience vote — and extra points for successful mini-game participation — a three-person judging panel would give their scores on each entry. Myself and Karina, Senior Software Engineering Manager, joined CTO Luca on a three-person panel.

I was looking for bold ideas around how AI was used to power each team's solution, while keeping feasibility and real-world impact in mind. Karina was always thinking about the impact, scalability, and security implications of the solution.

But It wasn’t just the ideas the judges were assessing, or what the teams built. Once every team had created their idea they had to pitch it to the judges and rest of the teams.

The delivery of the pitch is always a key factor in the judging process at TrueHack. It’s time to get the popcorn out. Let’s just say, the more eye-catching, hilarious, and sometimes outright strange the pitch is, the more points you get.

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected

At 4pm on Tuesday 1st April, the teams were let loose. Outside of the box thinking was encouraged, as was sampling the numerous tasty snacks on offer to fuel creative ideas.

Team PaiLayer was one of the strongest examples of AI in action. They built a TrueLayer Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that turned the checkout experience into a chat-based interaction.

Based on the success of this hackathon project, and after security reviews and extensive testing, we've made the MCP server available for anyone who wants to experiment. Once connected, our merchants can use an AI assistant, like Claude AI, to interact directly with TrueLayer and empower the AI to perform a range of banking and payment operations on their behalf.

For example you can test things such as asking the AI to:

• "fetch merchant account information"

• "pay out to external bank accounts"

• "check transactions"

For more information on how to connect to the MCP, check out the docs.

Other teams, including Team Jarvis, brought a different kind of innovation to the table. They created an AI-powered insights engine, which harnessed data from various internal sources. Their goal was to collect valuable information to improve internal operational efficiency, plus inform share of checkout initiatives for our merchants.

And Team Pay by Bank, Later focused on — as the name hints at — a Pay by Bank-powered buy now pay later product, complete with consumer-facing app. As part of the product, AI would analyse a shopper’s spending habits to offer them tailored credit, personalised to their needs.

But there can only be one TrueHack champion

After careful deliberation and points tallying, the winning team was Ghost Checkout. Their idea was all about taking share of checkout from cards by detecting what provider the user banks with via their card number. They leveraged TrueLayer’s existing WebSDK, which is built using NextJS, and built a specialised service for BIN mapping.

This team managed to perfect the balance between concept and execution. The idea was sharp, showcased innovative AI capability, using humour and storytelling to reframe card disruption in a memorable way.

Roll on TrueHack 9

TrueHack remains a key part of our culture here at TrueLayer. It empowers all of us to try things, work outside our comfort zones, while sharing ideas we are passionate about. The creative energy is contagious and carries over into our work well beyond the event.

On top of the main prize for the winning team, there were prizes for the mini-games, secret challenges, and the fan-favourite meme contest.

And let’s not forget the surprise hit of this year’s event, the karaoke contest. It was the perfect reminder that creativity comes in all forms, not just code.

And if you were lucky, you might just have caught sight of the occasional TrueHack dog.

Karina sums up the TrueHack and what it means to TrueLayer: "When I was interviewing for TrueLayer, I started my research on the company and the first article that popped up on LinkedIn was about TrueLayer’s hackathon. The story and the videos captivated me. I remember thinking, this is a company I would like to work for; one that is solving real challenges, but also takes the time to not take themselves so seriously from time to time!"

So cheers to you TrueHack 8, we can’t wait for TrueHack 9.