Sustainable Finance Live 2024: Hackathon winners announced

The Sustainable Finance Live 2024 Hackathon has officially concluded! The teams, which were split into ‘emerging’ and ‘established’ categories, worked on their products and pitches from 27 September to 10 October.

Hackathon themes for the 2024 teams included geospatial data and the role of AI; data fusion and LLMs; demand innovation and impact orientated financial instruments; enhancing nature through sustainable agriculture; and nature risk and reporting.

The judges and mentors of the hackathon were:

• Nigel Greenhill, director, Hill Stone Wood
• Mitesh Soni, client executive, AWS
• Richard Conway, CEO, Elastacloud
• David Gristwood, freelance consultant, ex Microsoft
• Sarah Sinclair, founder, Change Gap
• Darshna Shah, solution lead, Elastacloud
• Chryssi Chorafa, director, StarLiX
• Jean – Guillaume de Maneville, fintechs & financial sponsors, Natixis Corporate and Investment Banking
• Giles D’Souza, strategic business lead, Planet
• Andy Bennet, space lead, Innovate UK KTN
• Priyank Patwa, director, ESG digital, data and analytics FS lead, risk advisory, Deloitte UK
• Isabelle Chatel de Brancion, business and innovation lead – Geovation, Ordnance Survey Geovation

Emerging category winners



Team 3, made up of Juan Sabuco, Qiu Wong, Nell Agate Tsui, Max Neri, Jean Joy and Nicola Ranger, snatched the win in the emerging category.

Their solution addresses a crucial gap in the market: the ability to accurately evaluate nature related financial risks. The team’s platform will take into account nature data in order to enable businesses and investors to make more informed and sustainable decisions.

Taking Brazil, the world’s most biodiverse country thanks to the large coverage of the Amazon rainforest, the team explained how their platform works: “This wealth of biodiversity is involved in a number of ecosystem services, and throughout the tool, we’ve set out to evaluate and translate these services into financial metrics, which is an extremely important step as we move towards including nature and biodiversity in financial decision making.”

By using nature data to evaluate dependencies and impacts as well as locating hotspots, the tool shows the ecosystem services value at risk in Brazil across major sectors, including manufacturing and agriculture, which play important roles such as flood and staff protection.

Announcing the Team 3 win, Richard Peers said: “What we thought was extraordinary, was that this group, where most people had not met each other, came together. They wrestled down to a use case, which was clear and understandable for us as judges, and then drilled down good use of data and clearly demonstrated the value that could be derived of using this data in this use case. This was something that we really valued, and we’d love to see carried forward.”

Speaking to Finextra about their win, Nell Agate Tsui, climate stress testing and scenario analysis at HSBC, commented: “On behalf of the members of Team 3: Nature Risk & Reporting, we are so thrilled to have won the Emerging category! I wanted to say thanks once again to NayaOne for their sandbox tools and of course to the Sustainable Finance Live team for their mentorship, encouraging this springboard for tomorrow’s nature-related solutions.

“Having the chance to pitch our data product ‘NatureDelta’ alongside more established teams and observe innovation in action was the cherry on top of a lively two weeks. You have to be quite brazen to volunteer for such a task against such odds, but being grouped with other likeminded and passionate people meant the learning curve was fast and the output was efficiently deployed.”

Speaking to the team’s experience in the Hackathon, she continued: “The Sustainable Finance Live Hackathon provided a unique opportunity to crystallise thinking on a challenging subject matter. In our case, the task was to link nature transition risks to macroeconomic impacts. Our concept was finetuned to the financial services sector, namely stress-testing, which represents the coalface of risk management and strategic decision-making. It was great to conceptualise a possible path to success.”



Established category winners

In the established category, team AgriEco Hub by Afri GIS were crowned the winners of the 2024 Hackathon. The team consisted of CF Haasbroek, Christopher Ueckerman, Dicky Thomas, Eddie Griffiths, Liesel Lange, Martemie Le Roux, Nicolas Kemp and Tondani Phaswana. 

 

The team’s concept was to enable sustainable farming practices, optimise resource use, and facilitate access to sustainability-linked funding. Their pitched platform connects commercial farmers, smallholder farmers, and financial institutions to drive profitability, resource efficiency, and collaboration.

Each persona – commercial farmers, smallholder farmers, and financial institutions – are facing unique challenges, including water scarcity, climate change, economic pressures, and risk evaluation, among others. Afri GIS’ solution will help each persona address their individual challenges by providing streamlined farm management, enhanced collaboration, access to funding, risk reports, and more.

The AgriEco Hub platform leverages advanced technology to drive sustainable farming, using weather forecasting, GIS mapping, and real-time environmental data to support smart decision-making. This empowers all stakeholders to act on accurate, timely insights and drive sustainable outcomes.

Announcing the team’s win, Peers commented: “We were impressed with how much was done within ten days. I couldn’t believe the amount of content that the team put together, both in terms of the use cases, user journeys, business canvas, and logical architecture for the technology. We were really impressed with the capabilities of the offering itself, and the way it was communicated.”

Speaking to Finextra about their win, team AgriEco Hub commented: “Working as a team over the past ten days has been amazing, and we have once again realised that when like-minded individuals band together, we can change the world, one sustainable solution at a time. We are ecstatic about the victory and eager to launch the solution.

“The hackathon allowed us to concentrate on research and development for this solution, which we think fills the gap in green finance tools by seamlessly integrating smallholders, commercial farmers, and financial institutions to guarantee that green finance may be used where it is most needed. In addition to improving sustainable agriculture, the approach also supports biodiversity and—above all—makes sure that financial risk is reduced.”