Projective Group participates in successful Swift Hackathon

Global consultancy Projective Group has participated in an annual event to help provide digital solutions to the financial sector. The firm’s team eventually produced a prototype in just two weeks.
Each year, Swift hosts a hackathon, a social coding event that brings computer programmers and other interested people together to improve upon or build a new software programme. The 2024 event was participated in by 79 companies who entered teams to help build solutions for the future of capital markets, a rapidly evolving space with unique challenges but also opportunities for innovation. This high-paced industry, typified by increasing transaction volume and complexity, demands fast, reliable and efficient post-trade processes.
The Hackathon 2024 teams were tasked with two challenges: For Challenge One, teams were required to develop solutions capable of enhancing the speed and accuracy of post-trade processes; while for Challenge Two, teams were asked to unearth creative solutions that ensure that data remains private in tokenised trades. Among the attendees was a team from Projective Group, who chose to focus on Challenge One.
Helping to address many common industry issues such as transaction delays and errors, the team aimed 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.
According to a report posted on the consultancy’s website, Projective’s team set out to tackle the challenge by bringing together people from different parts of the firm, including data, transformation, payments, and risk and compliance, from across multiple European locations, to provide a variety of perspectives and expertise. The 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.
Following this session, Projective distilled defining issues to be fixed into three main problem statements:
- How can we implement intelligent systems for real-time discrepancy detection and resolution?
- How might we improve the STP rate of post-trade operations?
- How can we automate key post-trade activities, such as data entry and reconciliation, to reduce manual error and speed up transaction times?
According to the firm, “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.”
From this, the team formed a common solution. Identifying a need to build a User Centralised Platform, the team determined there should be a focus on voice input for trade initiation (e.g. dates USA vs rest of world); chatbot prompts and real-time suggestions; and auto-generation of trade corrections – allowing a human reviewer to review the underlying logic and approve/reject the correction.
From this, Projective’s team created two main use cases, which showed a range of five key benefits. The solution increased efficiency and speed, with the inclusion of AI significantly reducing the time required for trade reviews and decision-making, accelerating the entire process while maintaining accuracy. It improved manual oversight for compliance, by incorporating thresholds and rules, the platform allows for manual interventions where necessary, ensuring compliance standards are strictly maintained.
It also led to error reduction, as the centralised platform minimises trade errors and human mistakes in trade initiation, improving overall accuracy and reliability. It allowed for optimised resource allocation, with the inclusion of a chatbot-based prompt reducing both the time and resources needed to complete and settle trades. And finally, it improved the ease of management, as the platform’s design simplified ongoing management and changes, cutting down on the effort required to maintain and adjust it over time.
In the end, despite being up against a record-breaking field of 79 other entrants, Projective was just one of five companies shortlisted for Challenge One. This meant developing a real-life prototype of the proposed programme in just two weeks.
Following that rewarding experience, the team concluded, “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!”