SWIFT Hackathon 2022: Let your ideas fly
Can your team make the breakthroughs that matter for financial tech?
This September, some of the smartest minds in tech and finance will be striving to crack a big industry challenge. Be part of the solution – book your place among the elite thinkers now.
The SWIFT Hackathon has become an acclaimed annual hothouse of collaboration and innovation. 2021’s hugely successful event saw 25 teams from banks, fintechs, corporates and vendors emerge with ground-breaking solutions.
This year we’ll be looking for fresh ideas on the future of digital assets. So gather your team – prepare to challenge received wisdom and let your creativity soar!
This year’s challenge
Digital assets are the next frontier of finance – but how can we make them work more smoothly and securely? That’s the theme of the SWIFT Hackathon 2022.
At SWIFT, we’ve already been working with major players on these issues. Now we want to harness the whole of the industry in an intense push for breakthroughs.
Teams of up to ten can take part in the hackathon, which runs from 6 to 23 September. The winners will be announced at Sibos on 13 October.
1 – Interoperability
How might we achieve interoperability among multiple digital asset platforms to have scalable, secure, irrevocable exchange of assets against payment?
Teams should address one or more of these use cases: coin-to-coin, tokenised asset to single currency, tokenised asset purchase with multi-linking.
Teams should consider:
- Financial firms want faster transactions and reduced costs. Meanwhile, the introduction of new technologies may well help resolve longstanding interoperability issues.
- From a legal responsibility perspective, finality and irrevocability of asset purchase is a key question in traditional asset management.
2 – Ownership
How might we achieve traceability of ownership of digital assets across multiple ledgers on multiple technologies?
Teams should consider:
- The industry has been actively trying to gain control of, and improve, the traceability of ownership for traditional assets. Could the accelerated creation of digitally-native assets, and conversion of existing ones, bring new solutions?
- Digital assets will be expected to be transferable from one ledger to another; these ledgers use different technologies. Will this lead to increased complexity, or will it force issuers and intermediaries to adopt relevant solutions?
6 reasons why you need to take part
- Take time out to innovate with your team, beyond day-to-day workload pressures.
- Help your organisation by developing new solutions to pressing issues.
- Showcase your company and its innovation to the rest of the industry.
- Raise your personal and team profile and show the rest of your firm what you can do!
- Make new connections with your peers and SWIFT experts
- Push the industry forward through collaboration and fresh ideas.
Key timings
Registration opens07 July 2022 |
Participant onboarding01-19 August 2022 |
Registration closes12 August 2022 |
Hackathon schedule06-23 September 2022 |
Participants briefing sessions30 August-02 September 2022 |
Hackathon06-23 September 2022 |
Judging26-30 September 2022 |
Sibos session13 October 2022 |
Hear from last year’s winners
Last year’s two victorious teams offer an insight into their winning methods.
Hunting down fraud
Detecting transaction anomalies is a big industry headache, with research suggesting that 95% of triggered alerts are found to be false positives.
Deutsche Bank’s diverse nine-strong team set out to tackle this issue. “What motivated us was that the challenge was very similar to one we were already working on,” explains Javier Quintero, machine learning engineer. “We wanted to validate our knowledge and the method we use internally.”
This could have tangible benefits in the real world.
“The result could have tangible benefits in the real world,” says data scientist and team member Lukas Boschert, “adding an additional layer of security for compliance teams around the world.”
Machine learning breakthrough
J.P. Morgan’s team went all-out in their bid to create synthetic data sets that can be used to train machine learning services, while maintaining customer privacy.
“Today, not all institutions have equal access to data sets that allow them to train ML models and subsequently, detect fraud,” explains Ker Fran Lee, team member and Onyx product manager.
“Our success here means a lot more than just winning a competition. It has the potential to provide the financial community with the data they need, regardless of their size or resources, and collectively work to reduce fraud throughout our industry.”
Our success here means a lot more than just winning a competition – it has the potential to provide the financial community with the data they need.
