28/10/2026
HKU Team Wins Pioneer Award (Second Prize) at the Eighth Fintech80 Chengdu Hackathon
A five-member student team from The University of Hong Kong (HKU) received the Pioneer Award (Second Prize) at the Eighth Fintech80 Chengdu Hackathon. The competition brought together teams from eight universities, listed in the official SWUFE news release as Tsinghua University, the University of Science and Technology of China, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, HKU, the National University of Singapore, Queen’s University, ETH Zurich, and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. Including this year, HKU has won three Pioneer Awards and one Championship at the hackathon.
Their project, Blocks, is an AI-native financial application platform that financial institutions install on their own computers. Research analysts, risk and compliance teams, and wealth advisers can describe the tool they need in one sentence to get a working application—without writing code or waiting for the IT department.
In 80 hours, the team built the core workflow: app creation and pre-run checks, 18 tested calculations, scheduled runs every trading morning, run history, and single-file sharing so a colleague can run the same app on their own data. They also built three applications—AlphaVista for research, RiskRift for risk review, and WealthWeave for wealth advisers. The system is covered by more than 600 automated tests.
On Blocks, an app is a short document declaring the data it needs, what to calculate, when to run, and what to show—not bespoke code. Nothing is deployed, the AI never performs the calculations, and the data never leaves the firm. The same blocks were used to build all three applications without special code for any of them.
Reflecting on the 80-hour sprint, the team noted that the limit was never ideas, but hours—making “deciding what not to build” the real work. “It should work” was never accepted: a feature was only done when it was written, reviewed by a teammate who did not write it, and actually run. Following the competition, the team published the code as a public open-source repository so others can run it and build on it.
“Our team members are usually more international, a mix of students from different countries,” said Professor Siu-Ming Yiu, the team’s coach. “It is very nice to see that they can collaborate very well together. Second, I feel that our students are excellent with solid knowledge in both Finance and Computing. Their solutions always surprised me with innovative ideas tackling the major issues of the problems and they were able to complete a very comprehensive and functional prototype.”
The team was led by Jenny Li and coached by Professor Yiu, Master Programme Director and Professor in the School of Computing and Data Science (CDS), The University of Hong Kong. Congratulations to Bingxuan Li, Muhammad Abdur Saad, Ernest Lau, and Runqiu Xia.
