Key Takeaways
- Winners from DTCC’s second annual Innovate.DTCC Hackathon have been announced, with each winning project to be onboarded into the FINOS ecosystem to drive real-world adoption.
- Innovate.DTCC reflects DTCC’s ongoing commitment to advancing practical, industry‑relevant innovation.
- The industry-powered AI event united industry leaders to collaboratively develop AI solutions designed to scale beyond proof‑of‑concept around business-aligned innovation.
Innovators from across the financial industry came together for DTCC’s second annual Innovate.DTCC: Industry-Powered AI Hackathon, held February 23–27, 2026, with an awards ceremony on March 9, 2026.
This flagship event reflects DTCC’s commitment to open collaboration and industry leadership, bringing together technologists and business leaders from across the financial ecosystem to design AI solutions that move beyond proof‑of‑concept and toward ideas that can scale, mature and drive real‑world adoption across the industry—not just within a single firm.
Together, these innovators demonstrated how shared investment and collaboration can accelerate progress on complex, system‑wide challenges.
Business-Aligned Innovation from Day One
Unlike traditional hackathons that take a broad, exploratory approach, Innovate.DTCC is purpose-built around business‑aligned innovation.
The focus is not on building technology for its own sake, but on applying AI to real, high‑impact challenges facing financial services today, with the goal of driving meaningful and scalable business outcomes. To support this intent, teams competed across clearly defined tracks, each aligned to critical industry priorities:
- IT Innovation
- Financial & Cyber Risk Intelligence
- Regulatory Compliance & Governance
- Generative AI for Finance
- Employee & Customer Experience AI
- Internal Audit & Assurance (run independently with a dedicated judging panel and award structure)
This approach improved solution design, helped judges assess ideas using the right standards for each track, and kept teams focused on the business’s most important problems.
Awards Designed for Lasting Impact
Hackathon awards were intentionally structured to drive long‑term industry momentum, not one‑time recognition. Rather than cash prizes awarded directly to individuals or teams, funding grants are administered through the Fintech Open‑Source Foundation (FINOS) and applied directly to support the continued development and maturation of winning solutions.
Each winning project will be onboarded into the FINOS ecosystem, gaining access to shared infrastructure, governance and incubation support and increased industry visibility to drive real-world adoption. This model ensures that the strongest ideas don’t stop at the finish line but continue forward on a clear path to industry‑ready deployment.
2026 Award Recipients
- Gold ($100,000): “Snowflake & DTCC Improving Security Posture with AI” (Snowflake + DTCC) A natural-language, agentic AI threat-hunting approach unifying multiple security data sources to accelerate investigation and improve security posture.
- Silver ($75,000): “NovaMind” (Deutsche Bank) An AI-enabled approach to automate post-trade exception handling through an auditable, multi-agent pipeline designed for enterprise-scale economics and continuous improvement.
- Bronze ($40,000): “OpsFlow LLC” (OpsFlow LLC) An AI-driven compliance and architecture intelligence solution leveraging the FINOS CALM standard to automate architecture compliance and remediation workflows.
- Gold – Internal Audit Track ($35,000): “ACT!vated Intelligence” (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) AI‑powered cross‑agency audit intelligence enabling proactive, COSO (Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission) aligned risk‑based audit planning.
Looking Ahead
Innovate.DTCC reflects DTCC’s ongoing commitment to advancing practical, industry‑relevant innovation. As financial markets continue to adopt and operationalize AI, we are focused on converting promising ideas into scalable capabilities through disciplined experimentation, cross‑industry collaboration, and applied learning. This sustained effort supports responsible AI adoption as a business enabler and reinforces DTCC’s role in helping drive industry modernization and resilient market infrastructure.