A team of coders from Cape Town took second place in SunGard’s annual Codeathon in London, beating another 10 teams from seven countries in the finals. The team was selected from 500 developers that competed in the first round to be within the 51 finalists who went to London.
The finalists were given 48 hours and a mission to harness big data technology to create new compliance solutions for financial services firms. Most importantly, developers were given carte blanche to be imaginative without the usual pressure to follow safer and more cautious approaches.
“In an effort to support our customers with an increasingly sophisticated compliance environment, we gave our coders the challenge to use big data technology to attack real problems faced by chief compliance officers in financial institutions,” said Steven Silberstein, SunGard’s chief technology officer. ”Our codeathons are an illustration of our commitment to invest in the core research and development of our technology, bringing talent from across the organization together to explore new creative solutions that have the potential to benefit our financial services customers. This also underscores SunGard’s approach to cross-pollinating development efforts through close collaboration and innovation.”
The 5-person team from Cape Town created a tool to support compliance officers by easily identifying potential non-compliant trades through advanced visualization. Using an algorithm, big data is organized into clusters of typical or normal trades, which allows the compliance officer to quickly spot a trade that falls out of the norm. The information is represented graphically, so that compliance officers can click on a dot on a graph and go straight to the individual trade it represents.
The tool also allows for dynamic learning by creating patterns as the compliance officer indicates which trades are good or otherwise. The system is then able to apply these distinctions to new trades, thus flagging new potentially problematic trades even more quickly
First place was awarded to the team from Birmingham, Alabama, who created an advanced financial compliance and regulation application that uses Artificial Intelligence to predict and potentially prevent fraud. While third place was awarded to the Kari Ra team from Christchurch, New Zealand, who created an application to investigate various people and organizations and assess suitability for business.
