SWIFT Hackathon
Realising the power of AI
In 2021, we challenged 25 teams and over 180 participants to develop innovative solutions that can solve some of the biggest challenges in finance today.
Teams focused on how artificial intelligence and machine learning can be leveraged to help financial institutions effectively manage risk and develop anonymised datasets that test the next generation of AI-based services.
The winning teams – J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank – presented their solutions at the world’s largest transaction banking event – Sibos. And, to make the competition even more appealing, we’ve begun working with them to see if we can apply their creations to the real world.


What were the Hackathon challenges?
Challenge 1: Enhancing the accuracy of anomaly detection in payments
Teams were asked to develop novel data representations that can better detect anomalies in transactions. These needed to contribute to a reduction in the overall number of alerts and false positives without compromising accuracy or effectiveness.
Challenge 2: Building ‘synthetic’ data-sets required for AI-based product development, whilst protecting privacy
In the digital world, banks are striving to create new intelligent services that improve customer experiences of banking services – all underpinned by machine learning algorithms that recognise transaction types and learn from user behaviour. In this challenge, our teams developed novel simulation techniques that maintained the ‘utility’ of transaction data, whilst fully protecting the privacy of the institutions involved.