2021 Sustainable Finance Hack

SUMMARY

The Geneva School of Economics and Management, Open Geneva & UNIGE Career Services Center are organizing the 3rd edition of the Sustainable Finance Hack on November 26-27th 2021, as part of the Building Bridges Week.

> Discover the challenges and team pitches: https://sfh21.sparkboard.com

Objectives

Reinforce the sustainable finance community through:

• Collective practice of innovation,
• Career development and re-training (including soft skills),
• Prototyping of science-backed innovation,
• Product development through use-case bootstrapping.

What to expect?

A hackathon is a 24-hour collective intelligence moment to develop practical solutions to concrete problems. Nowadays, institutions recognize that social interactions, co-creation, and pooling ideas at large are core to advancing innovation.
Participants with various expertise and cultural backgrounds meet and work together in a hands-on approach to overcome a challenge. In an informal, playful but dynamic environment, they (i) create non-trivial social ties, (ii) learn from each other’s diverse backgrounds, and (iii) get pride from achieving together.
The hackathon way is instrumental to ground solid use cases, which may subsequently evolve into robust products or startups.

What is the Sustainable Finance Hack?

In the spirit of other hackathons conducted by corporates and universities across the globe, the Sustainable Finance Hack is a unique creative problem-solving moment. Over 24 hours, it brings together some of the brightest minds from universities, international organizations, and the private sector to solve non-trivial sustainable finance problems, such as:

• Up-skilling and career development for sustainable finance
• Technologies for transparency and accountability
• Earth observation and data science
• Business and human rights
• Behavioral economics and nudging
• Measuring environmental impacts on investments

For more information, see the 1st edition of the hackathon in October 2019, and discover the challenges of SFH 2020 during the 2nd edition in November 2020.

BUILDING BRIDGES WEEK

The Sustainable Finance Hack is held in preparation for the Building Bridges Week & Summit, which is a premier sustainable finance conference held in Geneva that bridges financial institutions with international organizations.

NOTE

The Sustainable Finance Hack will be held in person, online, or a hybrid.

ORGANIzERS & PARTNERS

testimonialS

"Pour nous, ce hackathon nous a évidemment permis de nous adresser à un public différent de celui auprès duquel nous avons l’habitude de parler, de nous montrer plus accessible, mais aussi et surtout de pouvoir bénéficier du point de vue et des idées de spécialistes en la matière. Plus personnellement, je dois admettre qu'après ces 24 heures, je suis convaincu et admiratif de l'expérience Hackathon; rassemblant un groupe de personnes remarquables aux compétences intellectuelles et pratiques diverses, et de la méthodologie de travail à l'aide d'outils interactifs collectifs. En ces temps d'incertitude, je suis assez enthousiaste de voir comment un groupe de personnes, qui ne se connaissent pas, peuvent échanger et s'entendre en douceur sur des objectifs communs, dans un environnement convivial d'apprentissage mutuel tout en s'amusant."
Romain Zappella, Private Partnerships & Philanthropy Specialist, International Committee of the Red Cross

“The Sustainable Finance Hackathon was an incredible opportunity for the students of the Geneva School of Economics and Management at the University of Geneva to do hands-on learning while producing new ideas and innovations in the much needed area of sustainable finance. It also provided a unique opportunity for our students to meet with important actors of Geneva’s sustainable finance ecosystem to better understand their needs and functioning. More generally, hackathons offer the possibility to our students and potential employers to get to know each other, while working together on some of society’s important challenges. This is infinitely more efficient that the traditional Career Days organized by most Universities to connect students with future employers.”
Marcelo Olarreaga, Dean, Geneva School of Economics and Management

"Sustainable Finance Hack was a fantastic experience for JP Morgan; 15 employees with financial and technical backgrounds associated with external students and professionals invented new concepts and built prototypes on sustainable finance in 26 hours. Like an accelerated training, the hackathon allowed us to get expertise on the domain and enriched our employees to think from a Sustainable Finance perspective. As a positive output, our employees are spreading Sustainable Finance across new initiatives that are transforming our bank to meet client needs. This created awareness to our senior management, supporting us, and providing innovative solutions for our clients: https://am.jpmorgan.com/gb/en/asset-management/per/investment-themes/esg”
Eric Bourdin, Tech Lead, JP Morgan