Santander awards solutions for restaurants, farmers and travel in the EUvsVirus hackaton

Innovators and problem-solvers from around the world put their creativity to the test, working to hack the covid-19 pandemic for three days in the EUvsVirus pan-European hackathon, which was hosted by the European Commission and EU member states with sponsorship from companies including Banco Santander.

The EUvsVirus hackathon generated 2,160 pioneering solutions aimed at fighting the challenges resulting from the coronavirus outbreak. Of these solutions, a total of 117 winners were named last week for different areas, such as health, business continuity, social & political cohesion, remote working & education, digital finance, etcetera.

Linsey Argalas, Santander’s Chief Digital & Innovation Officer, said: “The only way to face global challenges such as the covid-19 pandemic is to join forces. Santander will continue to find ways to help counteract the effects of the pandemic both within our Santander community and more widely. This hackathon presented an important way to support people and businesses worldwide during this extremely challenging time through innovation and technology.”

Santander sponsored the “New and resilient business models” challenge and awarded the following solutions:

• Hypanel, a technological solution for reopening Europe’s restaurants. The team from the Netherlands designed a transparent partitioning panel to install between restaurant tables to prevent the spread of aerosol particles, as well as a way to sterilize the air with UV light. Hypanel’s solution can allow restaurants to replace physical distancing requirements and resume profitable operations.

• sostenibl.es, which enables short marketing channels for farmers in need during the covid-19 crisis. sostenible.es is a digital network of SMEs in the organic agri-food sector designed to serve as a bridge between small farmers and end consumers. By building a digital farmers market, the team from France, Germany, and Spain is helping to create a B2B2C community around sustainable food that will continue adding value beyond the coronavirus response.

• It!, which is developing new safe ways of traveling in a post-covid-19 Europe. Recognizing that the coronavirus will likely change the way people travel, the team from Italy and Japan aims to better integrate destination management organization and destination management company efforts to raise destinations’ attractiveness while giving tourists a consistent, safe experience.

All the winners from the hackathon will be invited to a Matchathon from 22 to 25 May on the new EIC COVID platform, an online event that will facilitate match-making between winning teams and those who can use their solutions, such as hospitals. The Matchathon will also provide the winners with access to investors, corporations, foundations, and other funding opportunities from across the EU. In addition to Argalas’ support, Santander’s participation featured several key business and technology executives from Santander Digital who served as judges and mentors for the hackathon.

Those Santander partipants included Aiaz Kazi, Santander’s Chief Platform Officer; Abdenour Bezzouh, head of Technology & Operations in the division; Jose Resendiz, Chief Design Officer; Yogish Pai, Digital Transformation; Mike Almeraris, head of Developer and Content Ecosystem; Óscar Cristóbal Ruiz, Sales/Partner Engineer; and Benjamín Granados Matarranz, API Evangelist & Strategist. You can follow the Santander developers team on Twitter.