National Settlement Depository (NSD) and Central Counterparty National Clearing Centre (NCC CCP), members of the Moscow Exchange Group, have hosted NSD Progress Tech, a forum of software engineering students with a view to develop stock exchange services. The event brought together 30 teams of 120 future IT professionals.
The goal of the annual hackathon is to find talented students who would like to build an IT career in financial services companies. Thanks to NSD Progress Tech, young blockchain, back-end, and front-end developers and designers can gain an insight into how financial markets function, enjoy support from experts, and get a chance to start a career with NSD or CCP NCC.
During the competition, the hackathon participants created prototypes of real-life services designed to optimize the work of a financial institution. The participants were judged by the jury of experts from NSD and CCP NCC and competed in the following tracks:
- development of an open-source OCR tool-based service capable to recognize tabulated data and improve the quality of document recognition in comparison to a reference implementation;
- development of a blockchain-based platform for digital financial asset issuance, trading and redemption, operated by NSD; and
- product prototyping for data interchange with third-party organizations.
The prize pool was RUB 300,000, and the winner in each track was awarded a prize of RUB 100,000. Besides, the hackathon winners got an opportunity to participate in the NSD/CCP NCC traineeship program 2021-2022.
“Thanks to hackathons, we can quickly, within a short time, get acquainted with many talented students, while contestants are able to demonstrate their skills and get a chance to build a career in the heart of the financial market. NSD’s strategy provides for development and support of IT, which makes us open not only to advanced technologies, but also to young specialists who can offer lots of fresh ideas for the benefit of the company”, said Irina Antonova, Executive Board Member and HR Director, NSD.
“A hackathon is an ideal format for headhunting future IT professionals ready to deal with real-world tasks and develop marketable products. For many years now, NSD has been hosting this competition for developers. As a fast-growing company, we see the great potential in such activities. Brainstorming outside the incumbent team can give a boost to the development of company’s IT”, added Pavel Andrianov, Executive Board Member and IT Director, NSD.
“It would be fair to say that CCP NCC is a tech company, and we are obviously interested in hiring best IT professionals. For us, a hackathon is a way to present ourselves to talented, young and ambitious developers and an opportunity to contribute to promotion of the financial services sector in IT. As part of a hackathon, we show those interesting, challenging, and creative IT tasks we are, at CCP NCC, dealing with”, commented Konstantin Feoktistov, Executive Board Member and IT Director, CCP NCC.