On September 12, 11 teams from seven countries met at London’s Emirates Stadium to participate in the final championship round of SunGard’s second annual Codeathon, the Global Coder Cup. The finalists were given 48 hours and a clear mission: to harness big data technology to create new compliance solutions for financial services firms.

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. This was driven by creative use of multiple Artificial Intelligence technologies, including dynamic learning. “In essence, Artificial Intelligence in the compliance space can help prevent compliance incidents, such as insider trading, but could be expanded more widely,” said Anoop Nair, SunGard director of development and a member of the winning team, Foo Tomatons.

“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 team from Cape Town, South Africa, won second place by creating a compliance tracker, a tool that attempts to support compliance officers by easily identifying potential non-compliant trades through advanced visualization. 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.

The final championship, sponsored by Intel, included a judging panel consisting of SunGard’s chief technology officer, thought leaders and industry experts from Intel and Blackstone.

Out of the 115 teams that participated in the first round of the Global Coder Cup in June, the best teams from each region – North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, India and Africa – were selected to compete in the in-person final championship round at an inspiring venue, home of the Arsenal Football Club.

Last year the winning team of the 425 participants created a risk solution for corporate actions, using new visualization tools that provide the user with a more intuitive and holistic view of risk.