Sustainable Finance Live 2024: Hackathon winners announced

The Sustainable Finance Dwell 2024 Hackathon has formally concluded! The groups, which have been cut up into ‘rising’ and ‘established’ classes, labored on their merchandise and pitches from 27 September to 10 October.

Hackathon themes for the 2024 groups included geospatial information and the function of AI; information fusion and LLMs; demand innovation and affect oriented monetary devices; enhancing nature via sustainable agriculture; and nature danger and reporting.

The judges and mentors of the hackathon have been:

• Nigel Greenhill, director, Hill Stone Wooden
• Mitesh Soni, consumer govt, AWS
• Richard Conway, CEO, Elastacloud
• David Gristwood, freelance advisor, ex Microsoft
• Sarah Sinclair, founder, Change Hole
• Darshna Shah, resolution lead, Elastacloud
• Chryssi Chorafa, director, StarLiX
• Jean – Guillaume de Maneville, fintechs & monetary sponsors, Natixis Company and Funding Banking
• Giles D’Souza, strategic enterprise lead, Planet
• Andy Bennet, area lead, Innovate UK KTN
• Priyank Patwa, director, ESG digital, information and analytics FS lead, danger advisory, Deloitte UK
• Isabelle Chatel de Brancion, enterprise and innovation lead – Geovation, Ordnance Survey Geovation

Rising class winners



Workforce 3, made up of Juan Sabuco, Qiu Wong, Nell Agate Tsui, Max Neri, Jean Pleasure and Nicola Ranger, snatched the win within the rising class.

Their resolution addresses an important hole available in the market: the power to precisely consider nature associated monetary dangers. The crew’s platform will bear in mind nature information with a view to allow companies and buyers to make extra knowledgeable and sustainable selections.

Taking Brazil, the world’s most biodiverse nation due to the big protection of the Amazon rainforest, the crew defined how their platform works: “This wealth of biodiversity is concerned in numerous ecosystem companies, and all through the software, we have got down to consider and translate these companies into monetary metrics, which is a particularly vital step as we transfer in direction of together with nature and biodiversity in monetary resolution making.”

Through the use of nature information to judge dependencies and impacts in addition to finding hotspots, the software reveals the ecosystem companies worth in danger in Brazil throughout main sectors, together with manufacturing and agriculture, which play vital roles corresponding to flood and workers safety.

Saying the Workforce 3 win, Richard Friends stated: “What we thought was extraordinary, was that this group, the place most individuals had not met one another, got here collectively. They wrestled right down to a use case, which was clear and comprehensible for us as judges, after which drilled down good use of knowledge and clearly demonstrated the worth that may very well be derived of utilizing this information on this use case. This was one thing that we actually valued, and we would like to see carried ahead.”

Talking to Finextra about their win, Nell Agate Tsui, local weather stress testing and state of affairs evaluation at HSBC, commented: “On behalf of the members of Workforce 3: Nature Threat & Reporting, we’re so thrilled to have received the Rising class! I wished to say thanks as soon as once more to NayaOne for his or her sandbox instruments and naturally to the Sustainable Finance Dwell crew for his or her mentorship, encouraging this springboard for tomorrow’s nature-related options.

“Having the prospect to pitch our information product ‘NatureDelta’ alongside extra established groups and observe innovation in motion was the cherry on high of a energetic two weeks. It’s important to be fairly brazen to volunteer for such a activity towards such odds, however being grouped with different likeminded and passionate individuals meant the educational curve was quick and the output was effectively deployed.”

Talking to the crew’s expertise within the Hackathon, she continued: “The Sustainable Finance Dwell Hackathon supplied a singular alternative to crystallise pondering on a difficult subject material. In our case, the duty was to hyperlink nature transition dangers to macroeconomic impacts. Our idea was finetuned to the monetary companies sector, particularly stress-testing, which represents the coalface of danger administration and strategic decision-making. It was nice to conceptualise a doable path to success.”



Established class winners

Within the established class, crew AgriEco Hub by Afri GIS have been topped the winners of the 2024 Hackathon. The crew consisted of CF Haasbroek, Christopher Ueckerman, Dicky Thomas, Eddie Griffiths, Liesel Lange, Martemie Le Roux, Nicolas Kemp and Tondani Phaswana. 

 

The crew’s idea was to allow sustainable farming practices, optimise useful resource use, and facilitate entry to sustainability-linked funding. Their pitched platform connects business farmers, smallholder farmers, and monetary establishments to drive profitability, useful resource effectivity, and collaboration.

Every persona – business farmers, smallholder farmers, and monetary establishments – are dealing with distinctive challenges, together with water shortage, local weather change, financial pressures, and danger analysis, amongst others. Afri GIS’ resolution will assist every persona tackle their particular person challenges by offering streamlined farm administration, enhanced collaboration, entry to funding, danger stories, and extra.

The AgriEco Hub platform leverages superior expertise to drive sustainable farming, utilizing climate forecasting, GIS mapping, and real-time environmental information to help sensible decision-making. This empowers all stakeholders to behave on correct, well timed insights and drive sustainable outcomes.

Saying the crew’s win, Friends commented: “We have been impressed with how a lot was executed inside ten days. I could not imagine the quantity of content material that the crew put collectively, each when it comes to the use instances, consumer journeys, enterprise canvas, and logical structure for the expertise. We have been actually impressed with the capabilities of the providing itself, and the best way it was communicated.”

Talking to Finextra about their win, crew AgriEco Hub commented: “Working as a crew over the previous ten days has been wonderful, and we’ve as soon as once more realised that when like-minded people band collectively, we are able to change the world, one sustainable resolution at a time. We’re ecstatic concerning the victory and wanting to launch the answer.

“The hackathon allowed us to focus on analysis and growth for this resolution, which we expect fills the hole in inexperienced finance instruments by seamlessly integrating smallholders, business farmers, and monetary establishments to ensure that inexperienced finance could also be used the place it’s most wanted. Along with bettering sustainable agriculture, the strategy additionally helps biodiversity and—above all—makes positive that monetary danger is lowered.”