In October of 2022, our partners at the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) announced its inaugural FDX API Innovation Hackathon challenge.

Tasked with creating a new and innovative use case utilizing the FDX API, Akoya went to work in late November to produce an app that would be judged based on idea, code quality, presentation, documentation and relevance to FDX. The team saw this as a great opportunity to continue driving forward momentum in the Open Finance industry set on developing a common standard for financial data sharing in the United States. 

Akoya quickly assembled a cross-functional team of Product, Engineering, Cybersecurity, Solution Architects and Strategy experts to prove that new ideas can be brought to market quickly with just eight weeks to build out a winning solution. 

The problem Akoya collaborated to solve: 

One of the core tenets of both Akoya and FDX is to facilitate the flow of information in Open Finance. For this to happen – there is a strong need for the standardization of data, often in overlooked areas. 

To bring any semblance of standardization to the table, there needs to exist an interface that regulates the grammar and semantics of data and communications. This would be beneficial by: 

  1. Increasing the accessibility of Open Finance and enable additional entities to join conversation 
  2. Accelerating the growth of Open Finance in a real and sustainable way by increasing interoperability

The teamwork and winning solution:   

The team of ten Akoyan’s collaborated closely to deeply research, build out, test, package, document and demo their winning solution - FDX Recon or FDXr for short.   

FDX Recon is a validation and support tool for reconciling fintech responses to the FDX standard. FDXr audits data sets against the FDX issued data entity format. The tool uses CUE, an open-source language and superset of JSON, to verify both inbound and outbound data, with the capability to drill down to the exact point of divergence.  

FDXr can clearly pinpoint discrepancies in data and identify what needs to be adjusted in order to achieve FDX compliance. While FDXr currently supports the latest version of FDX standards, it is highly adaptable and scalable, and can be used to support all previously released versions. 

Leveraging a solution like FDXr greatly increases efficiency for internal processes while making FDX standards even more achievable for entities without incurring unwanted engineering costs. 

Learn more about Akoya and FDX Recon

Take a deeper dive into our winning submission and hear from the experts themselves. Akoya will be at the FDX Spring Global Summit 2023 in Raleigh, NC to host a hackathon focused session.  

Media Contact: Olivia Fahey, Olivia@akoya.com