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

Over 500 UBS employees from Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Americas joined together for the firm’s fifth global hackathon, making it the largest one UBS has organised to date. The event is an internal competition to find technology solutions for different challenges within the bank.

The hackathon took place over two days in Zurich, London, Weehawken, Singapore and Hong Kong, but also added 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 across a wide range of topics, including 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 5th 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.

The cyber-crime menace continues to throw up headlines on an almost daily basis. Recently, fo example, hundreds of thousands of British Airways' customer details were compromised. According to the Ponemon Institute, a US-based organisation exploring security and related issues, the global average cost of a data breach has this year risen by 6.4 per cent from a year ago to $3.86 million. The average cost for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information also increased by 4.8 per cent year-over-year to $148. The institute’s 2018 Study on Global Megatrends in Cybersecurity, based on comments from 1,100 industry figures, showed that 67 per cent believe cyber extortion, such as ransomware, will increase in frequency and payout. Less than half of IT security practitioners surveyed believe they can protect their organizations from cyber threats. That is down from 59 per cent three years ago.