Upcoming Sprints
The calendar, themes, and prizes laid out so you can plan around your term. First Finance-Athon: 19 August 2026, teams of 4, free to enter, 300 EUR first prize in credits.
Arena · Hackathons
Where alpha gets built, under pressure, against the clock.
Live, recurring competitions on real bank, PE, and FinTech briefs. Form a team, build to a deadline, defend your model to judges. This is the deal floor, simulated.
Why it matters
Skill is forged under pressure. A lecture can never take you to the deal floor.
Give yourself a weekend, a real brief, and a deadline that does not move, and you learn what actually separates analysts: how to scope a problem when the data is messy, how to decide when you cannot have everything, and how to defend a call to someone senior testing whether you understand your own model.
It matters because of how hiring now works. At the most competitive firms acceptance runs under 1 percent, summer-analyst timelines are set 12 to 18 months ahead, and firms increasingly screen for AI-compatible analytical behavior. Sponsored challenges are a low-cost, high-signal way for them to see that behavior in the wild.
Source: Perplexity research, 2026
/Pressure forges skill faster than lectures.
A weekend on a real brief teaches scoping, deciding, and defending under a clock that does not stop.
/Get seen.
Sponsor challenges put your work directly in front of firms hiring junior analysts, a far stronger signal than a line on a CV.
/A portfolio that proves judgment.
Judges score the thinking, not the polish, which is exactly the supervise-the-AI skill desks now hire for.
/Find your people.
Team Builder matches you with complementary builders, and the best teams keep working together long after the buzzer.
How it works
Event, Brief, Register, Team, Submit, Judge, Showcase.
You are encouraged to use AI inside the competition, because that is how the real desk works. The point is never the black-box answer. It is how well you direct the tools and verify what they hand back. A submission you can defend, line by line, beats a slicker one you cannot.
Sponsor Challenges
Briefs written by banks, private equity firms, and FinTech partners around problems they genuinely care about. That is what makes a strong showing mean something.
Past Editions
Winners, replays, and open-source repos go public, so you can study exactly how strong teams scoped and structured their work before you compete.
Leaderboards
Standing tracked globally, by campus, and by track. Campus leaderboards are student-led and community-organized, not university-affiliated.
Proof and credibility
Sprint themes track what is actually moving deal flow rather than a recycled textbook case. Briefs are written to reward the human-required calls AI still cannot make reliably, EBITDA normalization, deal narrative, and synergy credibility, so a strong finish signals real judgment to the firms watching, not just fast typing.
Source: Knowledge / AI Capability Assessment 2026 · Emerging IB Topics
Straight answers
Before you ask.
I am not good enough to compete yet.
Tracks are tiered. Foundations-level builders have their own bracket, so the Arena is where you level up, not where you are judged for not arriving finished.
Do I need a team?
No. Team Builder matches solo entrants by skill and availability, and many of the best partnerships start exactly this way.
Is this just resume theatre?
No. Sponsor briefs are real problems firms care about, and repos and replays are public, so the work stands on its own and cannot be faked after the fact.
Can I use AI in the competition?
Yes, and you should. You are judged on how well you direct and verify it, not on whether you used it. Black-box answers you cannot defend lose.
