Finastra announces winner of its hackathon to tackle bias in financial services

Finastra has announced the winner of its recent hackathon – Hack to the Future 3. Launched to help build an unbiased fintech future, the event saw over 600 participants from more than 50 countries, including Antarctica. With many women-led and diverse teams of students, fintech enthusiasts, financial institution developers and fintech founders all joining the movement, the hackathon is a step towards positive change and redefining the future of finance.

Prizes up for grabs included cash, as well as incubation and internship opportunities from Finastra and some of its 40+ partners.

And the winner is…

• Bloinx: A decentralized application using blockchain technology to help build savings communities by operating as a ROSCA administrator through smart contracts. Rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCA) e.g. tandas in Mexico, enable people with lack of financial knowledge and access to credit cards and bank loans to obtain money quickly through a money-pooling fund.

1^st Runner up:

• tinch.: An agri-fintech initiative to tackle bias against women in the agriculture sector when it comes to market price, access to agricultural loans and land availability.

2^nd Runner up:

• Qualify – Growth Simplified: A peer-to-peer lending platform to help low income communities generate credit scores and gain access to formal credit.

Sharon Doherty, Chief People and Places Officer at Finastra said, “We’re on a mission to make financial services more equitable and inclusive, leading by example. During International Women’s Day we shared a point of view that AI bias, if unchecked, could be one of the biggest drivers of inequality in our lifetime. In practical terms, financial solutions such as lending aren’t equally available to people of all genders and cultures.

We also launched a global hackathon to encourage women-led and diverse teams to join our global open innovation community to hack with us, with a particular focus on AI solutions. In fact, nearly 80% of the projects were led by women, which has shone a light on the wealth of female talent in the industry and has been wonderful to see.”

Adam Lieberman, Head of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at Finastra said, “From platforms that help assess algorithmic fairness metrics and synthetic data solutions that create more representative datasets to solutions tackling gender inequalities and the credit invisible, we have seen amazing AI-powered use cases for building an unbiased fintech future and fighting algorithmic bias.”

Finastra made its open development platform – FusionFabric.cloud, underpinned by Microsoft Azure – along with more than 180 APIs, SPIs and data sets available for the hackathon.

Check out the submitted projects here or join the conversation on social media using #HackToTheFuture, #HackingForGood and #OPENbydefault

To read recent Finastra-commissioned research from KPMG, centered on algorithmic bias, visit: Open by default | Finastra