Christopher Ket Yung Chee: From Hackathon First-Timer to Hackathon Winner

Christopher’s Innovative eWallet Shows Malaysian Innovation

Despite never having participated in a hackathon before, Christopher Ket Yung Chee beat out over a thousand participants to be selected as the Rapyd’s Fintech Hackathon Winner for the Asia Pacific (APAC).

From Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, Christopher drew on his 20 years of IT experience and passion for programming iOS/Android and SwiftUI to create his winning KyPay ewallet solution. His solution is a universal app that consists of an ewallet with an ecommerce marketplace that makes it easy to pay and get paid. 

Building An EWallet and Payments Experience with Rapyd’s API

Christopher first learned of the hackathon from Reddit. After learning that Rapyd had APIshe saw the hackathon as an opportunity to use the Apple SwiftUI framework he’d been teaching himself to develop an ewallet or shopping app.

And the prizes weren’t bad either. “Initially, the most attractive part was the prize,” he confessed. “However, I chose Rapyd because I had confidence… as I had built an ecommerce checkout with payment gateway websites years ago for some clients”. 

Helping Small Businesses Digitize and Receive Ecommerce Payments

Christopher’s KyPay app is a universal app consisting of an ewallet app with a shopping marketplace. He built the app to help small businesses digitize and quickly sell online, receive payments, and let customers find and pay online for everyday products or services like utility bills. 

Users can sign up with their phone number and a one-time password (OTP) and then access the KyPay wallet to send and receive payments. Having access to digital payments is especially crucial for customers and the many small brick-and-mortar businesses suffering big losses as customers stay home and shop online during the pandemic.

When asked whether he’d recommend Rapyd to another developer, Christopher said, “Yes, Rapyd has all the local payment methods and is pretty easy to integrate.” 

What Rapyd API Products made KyPay Possible?

• The Wallet API for the creation of the wallet
• The Collect API to top-up payment using online bank transfers and credit card
• The Disburse API for paying billers or other future facilities 
• The Wallet and Collect APIs made checkouts and receiving payments easy, even for an online marketplace, since it can automatically split the payment for respective sellers of the items in the buyer’s shopping cart.

When it Comes to a Winning Solution, Malaysia ‘Boleh’ Can Do It

“Of course, I was very excited when I first heard that I was chosen as one of the finalists,” said Christopher. As an active user of Malaysian ewallet and fintech apps and self-taught iOS/Android developer, the hackathon was the perfect opportunity for him to finally develop a fintech app of his own. 

He credits his experience in the Malaysian IT industry with giving him expertise using open-source resources, saying, “due to sparse resources with the company, we adopted all kinds of open source technologies for development.” It’s all about working smarter, not harder.

However, coding and development aren’t just Christopher’s job; they are also his passion. Outside of work, you’ll find him using Apple iOS/Swift to develop native iOS apps, building Android apps in Java or Kotlin, or sharing programming tips and tricks on his blog TechChee. 

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