Fintech Competition

Kennesaw State University holds a seminar every year called “The Future of Digital Payments,” where KSU students and industry leaders come to listen to panels and discuss about upcoming technologies and how they will impact the current trajectory of the fintech industry. This year, in partnership with the Georgia Fintech Academy, they held a competition for KSU students to pitch a potential fintech application or tool. I was one of the two chosen students to present my pitch to the entire seminar, where a group of judges would determine the winner.

My pitch was a relatively simple idea. Sports betting is a rapidly growing industry, and one that is immensely predatory. They present sports betting as a skill-based game, but if you truly have good odds, they shadow ban you. Furthermore, they take strategies straight out of casinos to keep users hooked and coming for more. Worst of all, you are always just a few taps away from placing another bet via your phone, with no real way to walk away, since modern life is built around the phone.

My pitch was to create a competitor that, instead of actually gambling your money, puts it into an investment or savings account. It allows you to feel the weight of risking your cash, but does not put your financial future at risk. It would be built with leaderboards and redeemable cosmetics to help encourage the social aspect, while including the real skill in sports betting to be fostered instead of suppressed. There’s more nuance to this idea, but I won’t dive too deep into it in this post.

The morning of the seminar, my nerves were quite shaky. It’s easy to get into your head, especially when you don’t have a clear idea of what to expect. Thoughts like, “You didn’t prepare enough”, “You’re going to fumble the speech”, and “He is going to do so much better than you” kept creeping in. However, nothing a few deep breaths and having a good friend by your side couldn’t solve. Eventually, about an hour and a half into the seminar, we reached the competition segment, and my rival was introduced to give his presentation.

His presentation was on a crypto-based application that would reward users with Solana coins for participating. His visual presentation was quite good, and definitely better than mine. However, I had an ace up my sleeve that gave me the edge. I had zero notes and no memorized speech. I made sure I knew everything about my pitch so that I could speak freely, using only my slides to prompt and guide the flow of my presentation. This, paired with my detailed points about the real impact sports betting has on people, eventually led to the awaited announcement: I had won the competition, and with it, a substantial scholarship that would cover my final year of college when combined with the Georgia HOPE scholarship.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of walking onto the stage, smiling, shaking hands, and holding a massive check.

If you want to learn a bit more, There is an short article writen that talks a bit about both my and my fellow competitor’s thoughts and ideas.

https://www.kennesaw.edu/coles/news/stories/2025-04-04-innovative-minds-shine-at-ksu-digital-payments-pitch-competition.php

There should be an embedded Youtube video of my presentation, but it can be blocked by some adblockers, so if you want watch it, here is the link: https://youtu.be/5hDiluGqkqE?si=ohtdz8rFVQDzK6_0