Bank Negara Malaysia and Australia’s financial intelligence agency AUSTRAC announces the winners of the inaugural International Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) Codeathon 2017.
Held in conjunction with the 3rd Counter-Terrorism Financing Summit 2017 on 18 – 19 November, the codeathon hosted 69 participants from 11 different countries. Participants hail from Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs), Financial Technology (FinTech) and Regulatory Technology (RegTech) communities; financial institutions; as well as private individuals (software developers, programmers, analysts, designers, engineers, students, or hobbyists).
This year’s challenge focused on three segments:
- Where is the money?: How would you monitor the changing world of value exchange internationally, taking into account emerging technologies and the shift from money to value in myriad forms?
- Who are you?: How would you identify people engaging in terrorist funding, money laundering, drugs or other criminal activities with crypto currencies or other pseudonymous channels?
- Help your community!: How would you identify tangible impending risks to the community to intercept harm pre-emptively, especially relating to money laundering/terrorism-financing (ML/TF)?
Participants choose at least one of the challenges and create solutions to address terrorism financing issues, as well as products with originality while maintaining ease of use.
The diverse group of participants promotes collaboration between different sectors. Solutions were presented in various forms, including live applications, websites or prototypes.
After a continuous 32 hours of coding, participants submitted their solutions with a short video explaining the use and relevance of the product to address the respective challenge.
The winners for the Codeathon are:
Team Categories:
- Champion – RM 15,800 ($5,000 AUD) : Overwatch – Blockchain Address Validation
- 1st runner-up – RM 9,500 ($3,000 AUD) : SocialHash
- 2nd runner-up – RM3,200 ($1,000 AUD) : LinkAI – The Network Miner
- Best Performed Team – RM 1,600 ($500 AUD) and trophy: Dodge Index
Individual Category:
- “Spirit of CTF Codeathon” Winner – RM 950 ($300 AUD) and trophy: Elliot Ian Shepherd
- “Spirit of CTF Codeathon” Runner-Up – Trophy: Yudhitia Mustika Sari
The judges found that the champion, Overwatch – Blockchain Address Validation created a program that showed genuine innovation, originality and most effectively addressed the “Help Your Community” Challenge. Their artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled service red-flag Blockchain addresses which have been directly involved in or linked to suspicious activity, providing more security for cryptocurrency users and platforms. The first runner-up, Social Hash received special mention and recognition for their solution focussing on smart contracts, allowing cross-border tracking of data from social networks and investigations.
Next year’s ASEAN-Australia Codeathon is hosted by AUSTRAC in Sydney from 14 – 15 March 2018 in the week prior to the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit and Counter-Terrorism Conference. Registration is now open on the AUSTRAC webs ite.
