Projective Group was thrilled to participate in this year’s Swift Hackathon, embracing the exciting challenge set by the Swift team to create an innovative solution that addressed the theme of ‘building the capital markets of the future’. We brought together a talented cross-functional team, combining our expertise from across the business. Here’s how our team approached the challenge and delivered impactful results.
The Swift Hackathon 2024 presented two capital markets challenges for participants to choose from: ‘Enhancing post-trade speed and accuracy’ and ‘Ensuring data privacy with tokenised trades’. The Projective Group team decided to focus on the former, helping to address many common industry issues such as transaction delays and errors. Their aim was to define a solution that leverages advanced technologies to create faster, more accurate, and more reliable post-trade processes, aligning with global trends towards shorter settlement cycles.
To tackle the challenge, we brought together people from different parts of our business including Data, Transformation, Payments, and Risk & Compliance, from across multiple European locations, to provide a variety of perspectives and expertise.
Our team utilised Design Thinking ideation approaches to help develop ideas that were innovative, feasible, and, more importantly, could be prototyped and showcased in a way that was easy to understand. The ideation session allows everyone within the team to produce and debate ideas in a way that allows solutions to be seen through many different lenses and ensuring greater consideration of relevant information or issues. This approach is something we commonly use for solving client problems, as well as our own, and allows us to produce the most suitable and effective solution to a challenge.
The first step to building our solution was defining the issues that needed to be fixed. From a list of many, we were able to produce three main problem statements:
These problem statements helped to govern the ideation session, always making sure that the ideas we generated related to the challenge at hand. With many ideas being discussed, having strong facilitation and control was critical to defining successful outcomes.
Another key factor the team had to consider was the needs and usability both for the consumer as well as solution provider, Swift. It was imperative that the solution was not only innovative, but also could be easily and practically scaled from a prototype whilst ultimately benefitting consumers. With this in mind, our team agreed that Artificial Intelligence would form the basis of our solution.
Following our rich and insightful ideation session, a common solution was formed. We identified a need to build a User Centralised Platform with a focus on:
From this, we created two main use cases where we see the solution being used:
With a record-breaking 79 entrants to this year’s hackathon, we were thrilled to be one of five shortlisted companies for this challenge, which meant developing a real-life prototype of our proposal in just two weeks! We were up against some very impressive entries and although we didn’t place this year, it was a truly enriching experience that allowed us to collaborate and utilise our combined expertise to tackle a real-world problem in today’s payments industry. We look forward to competing again next year!
