Aminu Abdul Manaf wins Stanbic App Challenge

Aminu Abdul Manaf, a level 300 student of the University of Health and Allied Sciences, has emerged winner of the Stanbic App Challenge.

Aminu won the challenge with the ZEALOUS App, a fusion of several mini apps which include a currency converter, with 171 currencies and live exchange rates.

The App offers the opportunity to check past rates and view the trend between two currencies on a line graph and also provides an expense tracker, interest rates on Treasury Bill Checker and live news from Ghanaweb.

Aminu walked away with GHC20,000 and an all-expense paid trip to the e-commerce Africa conference in Cape Town, South Africa in February 2017.

The App Challenge, a national mobile app development competition, forms part of the Bank’s Corporate Social Responsibility. It began in March and aimed to engage programmers and software teams to create innovative financial education tools.

Twenty-five financial literacy app prototypes, built for Android and IOS platforms were submitted for the App Challenge.

These apps had various ingenious tools designed to help people better understand how to manage their money and achieve their financial goals.

Mawuko Afadzinu, Head, Marketing and Communication at Stanbic Bank said the Bank is particularly concerned about the paucity of financial literacy in the country.

“One of the major reasons why so many of us in this part of the world have money issues is because we don’t understand the principles of handling and growing money”, Afadzinu said.

“That is why it behoves on us at Stanbic Bank to make sure the understanding and knowledge of the way we handle money becomes a part of the way we live”.

Nana Benneh Dwemoh, Head PBB, Stanbic Bank was confident the many creative ideas presented at the App Challenge will impact a lot of lives.

“it’s great to have young clever creative people coming up with such innovative apps to make lives easier,” he said.

“The world today is moving towards a digitised environment. And what’s more appropriate than to combine money with the digital world we now live in.”

Each submission was evaluated and the winners were determined based on conformity with financial literacy, creativity and originality of solution, viability of the concept, and thoroughness of the submitted materials in compliance with contest requirements.

The Zealous App was considered to be the most unique because it has user friendly interface, can sync across multiple devices, and information from the App can be converted to pdf and shared. Users do not need multiple financial apps since it has several components fused into one.