Business & Money | Thursday 14 July, 2016 4:00 am |

Emirates NBD, a leading banking Group in the region, today announced the winners of the 2016 GEMS Citizens of Tomorrow Innovation Competition, an initiative undertaken as part of Emirates NBD Group’s External Innovation program, in partnership with Emirates Islamic. 

Three winning teams received gift vouchers worth AED 5,000, AED 3,000 and AED 2,000 for first, second and third prizes respectively after the competition finals that took place at the GEMS Modern Academy, Dubai. The awards ceremony was the culmination of a month-long innovation program for over 200 school students aged between 13 and 17 across 32 GEMS schools in the UAE who worked in teams to develop innovative concepts centred around three challenge themes: ‘Future Banking’, ‘Innovation in Cards’ and ‘Community’, creating business models and basic prototypes for their concepts.

The winning team, Amwallet, proposed a personal financial management app based on artificial intelligence. The second placed team, Cred+ proposed an app for youth that would collect points based on their active involvement with the bank. The Epsilon team was placed third and presented an interesting concept of app-only digital debit card.

Commenting on the innovation competition, Husam Al Sayed, Group Chief Human Resource Officer, Emirates NBD said, “As a company that places innovation and technology at the heart of its customer offering, we were delighted to tap into the potential of these young minds and offer them a creative environment to innovate. As Dubai moves forward in the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai to become a smart city, Emirates NBD looks forward to fostering a greater innovation culture not just within our bank, but also in our community.”

Emirates NBD is a digital pioneer in the GCC region and a key player in the emergent global digital banking industry. In recent times, Emirates NBD has launched major innovations to keep itself at the forefront of digital banking in the UAE, in support of the UAE’s smart transformation. The bank recently announced a AED 500 million investment over the next three years towards digital innovation and multichannel transformation of processes, products and services.

Nargish Khambatta, Principal, GEMS Modern Academy added, “It is important to provide opportunities to young innovators to re-kindle their already curious minds to make a difference in day to day life, not only what is around them now but for the future generations to come. This event was a great mix of practical ideas, futuristic thinking and entrepreneurial style of pitching. It was fabulous to see 13 - 17 year olds from GEMS Schools engage in a meaningful exercise like this. We are glad that we hosted the Citizens of the Tomorrow competition by Emirates NBD Group as part of our innovation for community program.”