The winners of Youth Day FinTech, which was held as part of the Forum Innovative Financial Technologies FINOPOLIS for the second year in a row, were announced on 17 October.

The qualifying round took place in summer 2018, with applications submitted by more than 100 student teams from different regions of the Russian Federation. It consisted of a case study championship during which teams remotely completed test assignments from Forum participants and their performance was evaluated by leading financial sector experts. Twelve student teams from nine Russian cities, including two teams from the Sirius Educational Centre, reached the final.

During the first day of the youth programme, the participants held a competition to tackle real market case studies and defended their projects before the competition commission.

The teams were given one of four case studies, which were described during the following pitch sessions:

• Create a solution for managing and planning a family budget.

• Offer an ideal solution for managing personal finances.

• Improve an existing bank product – the campus card.

• Develop a mechanism to study the needs of financial institution clients based on publications in the mass media and social media.

The winners of the FinTech Battle were:

• the ALSER team (Don State Technical University)

• the Evil Slippers team (Perm State National Research University)

• the Kitek team (St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics and St. Petersburg State University of Economics)

• the Decentury team (Novosibirsk State University).

“As you know, our Forum is quite young. This is the fourth time we have held it and only the second Youth Day. Last year, it generated interest among a lot of people, and this year we are seeing quite a bit of interest from market participants. Managers from numerous financial companies asked if they could attend lectures on the Youth Day, have a look at the teams, and see what young people are up to. This suggests that our financial organizations have a great need for you and what you are doing”, Bank of Russia Chairwoman Elvira Nabiullina said in her speech to the Youth Day FinTech participants.

In addition to the competition, the Youth Day participants attended lectures and master classes given by key FINOPOLIS partners and networked with successful FinTech start-ups and the heads of leading Russian banks and IT companies. They also attended an open lecture titled ‘FinTech – Platforms and Strategies, Challenges and Opportunities’, which was given by Vasant Dhar, a professor at the Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science at New York University.