PayPay

PayPay Hackathon in Product

Theme
Things that innovate
PayPay Group Leverage AI & Cross Company Collaboration

RULES

01

5 members in
1 team at max.

02

Develop a working prototype in 2 days.

03

Give a presentation and demo within 180 seconds.

TEAMS

Digital Financial Platform Award

PayPay Quest

Team Member Kiyoshi Yamashita / Naoki Kodama / Kazuki Kumada / Mitsugu Sueyoshi / Rui Hokama

Team Comments We are truly honored to receive the Digital Financial Platform Award. Our project, "PayPay Quest," was created with the goal of strengthening synergy across the PayPay Group.

While each service within the PayPay Group is highly attractive on its own, we felt there was a challenge in how these services are connected. In particular, some services remain less visible to users due to the relatively weak horizontal linkage between them. We believed that helping users naturally discover and experience the broader value of the PayPay Group was an important opportunity.

To address this challenge, we designed PayPay Quest as a service that users would want to engage with in their everyday lives. By interacting with Pay-nyan, a PayPay Group mascot character we designed, users can enjoy completing simple quests as part of their daily routines. Through these small, approachable interactions, users are gradually introduced to different PayPay services and can experience the value of the group as a whole, rather than as isolated offerings.

One of the biggest challenges in both the design and implementation phases was creating content that users would want to come back to every day. Rather than building something that felt forced or purely instructional, we focused on making the experience light, enjoyable, and sustainable over time. This required careful consideration of user motivation and difficulty balance. Specifically, by implementing "Gacha" (a lucky draw for character accessories) and character dress-up features, we succeeded in making Pay-nyan a more familiar and approachable presence that users enjoy interacting with.

Working on this project with the same team we collaborate with daily was a major strength. In our regular work, we actively use AI tools to improve productivity and idea generation, and this experience proved extremely valuable during the hackathon. By leveraging AI for coding, design, and creating presentation materials, we were able to iterate quickly and make better decisions within a limited timeframe.

Through this hackathon, we were reminded of both the difficulty of turning abstract ideas into concrete products and the power of strong teamwork supported by the right tools. Receiving this award as a team is a great honor for all of us, and it has further motivated us to continue exploring new ways to create impactful solutions that expand the value of the PayPay Group.

PayPay Group Heads Award

PayPay-Gotchi

Team Member DanYao Zhou / Rei Truong / Pranav Gajjewar /
Jeremy Pichon

Team Comments Winning the Group Head Award was both exciting and humbling for our team. We sincerely thank the company for organizing this hackathon and the judges for recognizing our work.

The idea was inspired by the recent resurgence of nostalgic digital experiences in Japan. Building on this cultural momentum, we explored how a PayPay product could evolve beyond pure utility to deliver emotional value, fostering a deeper and more meaningful connection with users.

One of the key challenges was designing an engaging and interactive experience within existing technical constraints. As a team of four, every member moved quickly and efficiently, combining focused development with strong mutual support despite busy schedules.

Looking ahead, we’re excited about the potential to further develop this concept by leveraging PayPay Group synergy, data-driven insights, and meaningful user impact.

AI Hack Award

Team MirAI

Team Member Hari Korrapati / Steven Tran / William Jiewandana / Daniel Li

Team Comments We are honored to receive the AI Hack Award at this year's PayPay Group Hackathon!

This award was a pleasant surprise. Although our project idea did not demonstrate the cross-company collaboration theme of the hackathon as strongly as others, we had conviction that our idea was a legitimate solution to real problems that we face in our daily working environment.

The original inspiration for this idea came from the challenge of managing multiple external dependencies during project development. Our tasks would have dependencies on other teams, and other teams would have dependencies on our tasks. With such a complicated network of dependencies, Jira and other existing tools did not have a simple way to clearly visualize these cross-team dependencies in a single place. Our idea was born directly from this day-to-day experience.

Our team members happened to all be backend developers. One of the biggest challenges was learning frontend development for the first time. The UI in particular was especially challenging to structure the dependency hierarchy to make cross-team dependencies as easy to understand as possible. We wanted to ensure that the tool presents complex relationships in a simple, intuitive way.

We are truly thankful to the organizers for making this hackathon possible, and we deeply appreciate the judges for recognizing our efforts and believing in our idea.

Most Popular Award

The Last Commit

Team Member Sunackshi Sharma / Cheng Tak Kin (Gin) /
Dennis Sandjaya / Sahanaka Nanayakkara /
Raj (Shubho Shaha)

Team Comments Our idea came from a real challenge we faced at PayPay Security where the other non-tech departments are dependent on the tech team for their day-to-day work to gather data about customers, orders, transactions, stocks, brands etc. We started with a different idea but eventually finalized on this one. We thought this could benefit many internal members across group companies. We were very thrilled to win the most popular award, I don't think any of us were focused on just winning and hence we were even happier. More than the win itself, we loved spending time as a team for 3 days and working towards building a solution and spending the last few moments finalizing the presentation. Lastly, we want to thank the organizing team for keeping all group companies included in the hackathon this year.