The first Sustainable Finance hackathon run by data science specialists Elastacloud in association with Finextra and Responsible Risk, took place on 16 and 17 January bringing together 38 professionals from the finance and technology sectors.
The hackathon pitted three teams against each other to devise innovative solutions to sustainable matters, such as carbon emissions and deforestation, based on a paper produced by not-for-profit organisation Green RWA which attempts to model climate risk in credit.
Judges scored the submissions based on financial clarity, data science approach, overall technical competence and ability of the solution to be repeated.
The winning team 'A&J''s solution focused on the cement industry and created a sample loan book application which factored in credit risk based on whether the environmentally friendliness of ccement producers' processes.
The judges decided that the project harnessed innovative use of natural language processing (NLP) via the European Union's technical expert group on sustainable finance (TEG)'s taxonomy to extract relevant information from these disclosure reports.
Runner up, 'DeepGreen' proposed a solution tying deforestation in Brazil to the pricing of soybeans, attempting to draw a correlation between the two based on the assumption that the land would then be used for bean production.
Third-placed 'Banks4climate' devised a platform to create a national carbon index to penalise national credit ratings based on carbon emissions.
After this event's success, Elastacloud now plan to run further hackathons to devise solutions in line with topics presented at the Sustainable Finance Live co-creation workshops.