Skip to main content
AI in Financial Services

FinTech Disruption Hackathon 2024

A focused hackathon for financial services innovation, where teams built AI-driven solutions for payments, risk management, and regulatory compliance. Sponsored by leading European banks and fintech firms.

June 7, 2024 – June 9, 2024 London, United Kingdom 18 teams 72 participants

Event Overview

The FinTech Disruption Hackathon 2024 gathered 72 participants in London to reimagine financial services through AI. Sponsored by three leading European banks and two fintech scale-ups, this event focused exclusively on the unique challenges and regulatory constraints of the financial industry.

Challenge Tracks

Teams selected from two core tracks:

  • Payments & Fraud — Build intelligent systems for real-time fraud detection, payment optimization, or cross-border transaction efficiency
  • Risk & Compliance — Create AI tools that streamline regulatory reporting, automate KYC/AML processes, or improve credit risk modelling

Judging Criteria

A panel of industry executives and technical leaders evaluated each solution:

  1. Regulatory Awareness (25%) — Understanding of compliance constraints and data privacy
  2. Technical Sophistication (25%) — Model quality, system architecture, and code maturity
  3. Customer Impact (25%) — Clear benefits for end users or operational teams
  4. Scalability (25%) — Ability to handle production volumes and integrate with existing infrastructure

Results

The event produced three solutions that entered pilot programmes with sponsoring organizations within 90 days. The winning team's fraud detection prototype reduced false positive rates by 40% on the provided test dataset.

Teams & Winners

Meet the teams who competed and the projects they built.

1st Place

Team PayFlow

Project
FraudShield AI

A real-time fraud detection system using graph neural networks to identify suspicious transaction patterns across payment networks. FraudShield reduced false positive rates by 40% compared to the baseline rule-based system.

PythonPyTorch GeometricApache FlinkNeo4jReactD3.js
Team Members
AB
Anna Bergström
Team Lead & ML Engineer

ML engineer with 7 years of experience in fraud detection and anomaly detection systems.

DO
Daniel Okonkwo
Data Engineer

Data engineer specialising in real-time streaming architectures and graph databases.

LZ
Lisa Zhang
Frontend Developer

Frontend developer focused on data visualisation and real-time monitoring dashboards.

HL
Henrik Larsen
Domain Expert & Business Analyst

Former banking compliance officer turned fintech consultant with deep payments domain expertise.

2nd Place

Team RiskGuard

Project
RegLens

An AI-powered regulatory change management platform that monitors global financial regulations, extracts requirements, and maps them to internal controls. RegLens demonstrated automated compliance gap analysis across 3 jurisdictions.

PythonspaCyGPT-4FastAPIVue.jsElasticsearch
Team Members
FA
Fatima Al-Rashid
Team Lead & NLP Engineer

NLP engineer with expertise in legal document analysis and financial regulation extraction.

CW
Christopher Wright
Backend Developer

Backend developer with experience building scalable document processing systems.

YT
Yuki Tanaka
Data Scientist

Data scientist with a background in financial risk modelling and regulatory technology.

3rd Place

Team SmartLedger

Project
CreditSense

An explainable AI credit scoring system that combines traditional financial data with alternative data sources to improve lending decisions for underserved populations, while providing clear explanations for every decision.

Pythonscikit-learnSHAPFastAPIReactPostgreSQL
Team Members
RM
Roberto Morales
Team Lead & Data Scientist

Data scientist passionate about responsible AI and financial inclusion.

EJ
Emma Johansson
ML Engineer

ML engineer specialising in fairness-aware machine learning and model interpretability.

AH
Ahmed Hassan
Full-Stack Developer

Full-stack developer building ethical fintech products that expand access to financial services.