The inaugural Sustainable Finance hackathon, hosted by data science experts Elastacloud in collaboration with Finextra and Responsible Risk, took place on January 16 and 17, bringing together 38 professionals from the finance and tech industries.
During the hackathon, participants were divided into three teams, each tasked with developing innovative solutions to pressing environmental issues such as carbon emissions and deforestation. Their work was informed by a paper from the non-profit organization Green RWA, which seeks to model climate risk in credit assessments.
Submissions were evaluated by judges based on various criteria, including financial transparency, data science methodologies, technical proficiency, and the replicability of each solution.
The team A&J emerged victorious with their project centered on the cement industry. They designed a prototype loan application that incorporated credit risk assessments based on the environmental practices of cement producers. The judges praised their innovative application of natural language processing (NLP), leveraging insights from the European Union’s technical expert group on sustainable finance (TEG) to extract pertinent information from disclosure reports.
The runner-up, DeepGreen, presented a solution that connected deforestation in Brazil with soybean pricing. Their approach aimed to identify a correlation by suggesting that land previously used for forests would be repurposed for soybean cultivation.
Claiming third place, Banks4climate introduced a platform intended to create a national carbon index that would adjust national credit ratings in accordance with carbon emission levels.
Encouraged by the success of this event, Elastacloud plans to organize additional hackathons focused on developing solutions aligned with topics raised during the Sustainable Finance Live co-creation workshops.