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 more than 600 participants from 50-plus countries, including Antarctica. Prizes up for grabs included cash, as well as incubation and internship opportunities from Finastra and some of its more than 40 partners.
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.
The first runner up is 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. Third place goes to Qualify – Growth Simplified, a peer-to-peer lending platform to help low income communities generate credit scores and gain access to formal credit.
“We’re on a mission to make financial services more equitable and inclusive, leading by example,” Finastra chief people and places officer Sharon Doherty said. “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 per cent 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.”
“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,” Adam Lieberman, head of AI and machine learning at Finastra said.
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
