The hackathon took place over two days in Zurich, London, Weehawken, Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as nine virtual locations.

More than 500 UBS employees from Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Americas joined together for the firm’s fifth global hackathon, the bank's largest ever, as staff competed to come up with ideas that can propel the bank's technology offerings.

The hackathon took place over two days in Zurich, London, Weehawken (New Jersey), Singapore and Hong Kong, but also within nine virtual locations: Pune, Nashville, Krakow, Wroclaw, Chicago, Stamford, Mexico City, Sao Paolo and Tokyo. 
 
As well as engaging the technology developer community, it provides opportunities to train, learn new technologies and identify potential ideas, while bringing technology and business teams closer together as they work in teams of approximately six people. 

The firm said that some “very interesting ideas” came from the event including across a wide range of topics, from sustainable investment reporting, AI based virtual assistants, automated meeting minutes and crypto currency portfolio management tools.

"The engineering culture is critical to the technology organization at UBS and one of my personal areas of focus,” said Mike Dargan, group head of technology at UBS. “As an early adopter, this is our fifth year running a group-wide hackathon, and the progress over the years has been impressive.  It's great to see our teams coming together from all areas to use tech to solve big and small challenges.  The spirit of these events is about collaboration, but for me, it's also about seeing the unifying power of technology and its ability to bring people together for a common purpose.   I know our teams come away from this feeling energized and carry the experience with them back into their daily lives."

This hackathon comes at a time when financial services firms should be improving their cyber security. This publication published a guest article in July - How Wealth Managers Can Fight Cyber-Attackers. Also in June, this publication reported that US banking and investment giant Goldman Sachs teamed up with a UK security firm to train staff in a bid to tackle the fight against cyber-criminals.

Recent years have seen a number of banks and financial services firms develop technology "labs" to boost ideas and offerings around areas such as artificial intelligence/machine learning, Big Data and distributed ledger platforms. Banks have seen this as a way to avoid being overtaken by upstart smaller businesses.