ACTUS Algorithmic Financial Contracts Use Case Competition
Shaping the Future of Finance with Machine-executable, Single-source-of-truth Algorithmic Financial Contracts.
Winners:
Winners:
Top Prize: Pedro N Rodriguez Hernandez, (JACTUS)
2nd Tier
Cosimo Bassi, (Debt Algorand Standard Application)
Nishanthini S,, Harishmitha K, Kaviyaa N, Serin K Thomas, Dr. S. Thiliga (ACTUS-Mentor)
3rd Tier: (Special Recognition):
Ajay Kumar Kakarania (ContexQ: Graph AI for Enterprise Risk Intelligence & Financial Stability)
Frans Van Ek, (ACTUS-I Insurance)
Mark Flood, Elisa Kendall, Pete Rivett, Meng Weng Wong, Matt Wilson (Comprehensive, Standardized, Machine-Readable Contract Representation)
Top Prize: Pedro N Rodriguez Hernandez, (JACTUS)
2nd Tier
Cosimo Bassi, (Debt Algorand Standard Application)
Nishanthini S,, Harishmitha K, Kaviyaa N, Serin K Thomas, Dr. S. Thiliga (ACTUS-Mentor)
3rd Tier: (Special Recognition):
Ajay Kumar Kakarania (ContexQ: Graph AI for Enterprise Risk Intelligence & Financial Stability)
Frans Van Ek, (ACTUS-I Insurance)
Mark Flood, Elisa Kendall, Pete Rivett, Meng Weng Wong, Matt Wilson (Comprehensive, Standardized, Machine-Readable Contract Representation)
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#actus #cashflows #financialcontracts #financialanalysis #enterpriseriskmanagement #digitalassets #algorithms
Your Path to Financial Innovation
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Register Your Interest
Begin by registering your interest in the ACTUS Competition. This initial step captures basic contact details and indicates your intention to participate. You’ll gain access to competition updates and resources.
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Share Your Vision
Complete your registration by providing additional information about your background and initial ideas or areas of interest.
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Shortlist Finalists
A panel of experts will review all registered participants and select the most promising teams to advance. These finalists will proceed to the proposal and prototype development stage.
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Build and Deliver
Submit your detailed proposal and working prototype or proof-of-concept. Showcase how your solution leverages ACTUS standards to address real-world financial challenges.
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Announce Winners
The best solutions will be recognized and awarded. Winners will gain visibility, recognition, and opportunities to collaborate on further development.
Register Your Interest
Begin by registering your interest in the ACTUS Competition. This initial step captures basic contact details and indicates your intention to participate. You’ll gain access to competition updates and resources.
Share Your Vision
Complete your registration by providing additional information about your background and initial ideas or areas of interest.
Shortlist Finalists
A panel of experts will review all registered participants and select the most promising teams to advance. These finalists will proceed to the proposal and prototype development stage.
Build and Deliver
Submit your detailed proposal and working prototype or proof-of-concept. Showcase how your solution leverages ACTUS standards to address real-world financial challenges.
Announce Winners
The best solutions will be recognized and awarded. Winners will gain visibility, recognition, and opportunities to collaborate on further development.
All timings are as per (GMT -5:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada), Bogota, Lima
Organized By
In Partnership With
About Us
The ACTUS Financial Research Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing financial stability and transparency through the standardization of financial contracts. By defining algorithmic contract types, ACTUS provides a universal language for representing financial instruments, enabling consistency, comparability, and efficiency across the financial system. Its mission is to reduce systemic risk, create network effect efficiencies to the financial industry, support financial literacy and financial analysis educational programs, facilitate public oversight, and stimulate innovation by making financial data more transparent and interoperable.
The ACTUS Algorithmic Financial Contracts Use Case Competition invites developers, researchers, students, higher education and industry professionals to showcase innovative applications of ACTUS standards. Participants will explore real-world use cases spanning risk management, quantitative modeling, digital assets, regulatory oversight, and financial education. The competition aims to highlight how ACTUS can serve as a foundation for next-generation fintech, RegTech, and systemic risk solutions, while fostering creativity, collaboration, and meaningful impact in the financial ecosystem.
Proposal Domains
The overriding objective of the ACTUS Competition is to invite the development of solutions to challenges or opportunities in the financial industry that demonstrate the many benefits, efficiencies and competitive advantages that the ACTUS Algorithmic Financial Contract Standard can enable. The combined ACTUS data and algorithmic standard for financial contracts and their cash flows is foundational across the entire financial industry. Furthermore, the use and adoption of the ACTUS methodology in financial education curricula will provide the financial industry with new generations of financial professionals and consumers alike who are better able to both manage and adapt to the increasingly dynamic nature of the global financial economy. Accordingly, there are many different areas and potential uses of ACTUS that either improve on existing solutions or create new opportunities and capabilities that do not currently exist. A list of possible topics to promote or stimulate your thinking is provided, but this list is simply suggestive, and proposals need not be restricted to the current list of topics.
#1 Risk Management
Risk Management & Financial Stability
- Forward-looking portfolio runoff and liquidity risk analysis – Use ACTUS cashflow projections to anticipate liquidity gaps and manage runoff risk of banking or fund portfolios.
- Stress testing financial institutions using ACTUS cashflow projections – Apply ACTUS scenarios to evaluate resilience under adverse conditions.
- System-wide risk assessment and macroprudential monitoring – Aggregate ACTUS-based data to assess contagion channels and systemic vulnerabilities.
- Cash management applications for organizational or departmental structures – Build dashboards that visualize liquidity and risk across entities or departments.
- Use of AI/ML on ACTUS-generated cash flow datasets produced using Monte Carlo methods in order to identify correlated risk exposures and anomalies that span a robust set of future stochastic scenarios.
#2 FinTech / Digital Assets
FinTech Innovation and Digital Assets
- Utilize the ACTUS Algorithmic Contract Types to create a micro-lending business platform.
- Develop a Stablecoin digital asset smart contract using ACTUS.
- Financial literacy: demonstrate personal finance, educational or wealth management tools or services powered by ACTUS.
- Create, analyze, and transact tokenized financial products using smart financial contracts with ACTUS.
#3 RegTech / SupTech
RegTech, Compliance and Reporting
- Demonstrate the efficiencies in the use of ACTUS for "bottom-up" classification, analysis and aggregation of ACTUS-generated financial contract cash flows of a hypothetical financial institution to automate the generation of selected regulatory reporting requirements.
- Demonstrate tools and methods to improve institutional and systemic oversight processes by using ACTUS data standards and algorithms to consolidate the financial conditions of monitored institutions while preserving the ability to drill down to individual contracts.
- Proof-of-concept applications with regulators (e.g., ECB use cases) – Explore real-world pilots that test ACTUS in regulatory settings, also for systemic risk analytics.
- Use the ACTUS standard to demonstrate how to enable regulators to understand the interconnectedness in financial markets and related risks to macroprudential stability.
#4 Standards and Education
ACTUS Enhancements and Education
- Develop teaching materials and educational curricula using ACTUS: slides, case studies, and labs that make ACTUS accessible in classrooms and which provide the means to cultivate financial literacy as well as financial analysis competency.
- Extend the open source ACTUS Service Community Edition:
- Develop an intuitive, web front-end GUI for creating and managing portfolios of ACTUS contracts, external risk models, and interest rate scenarios,
- Extract and map external financial contract data into the ACTUS standard, and
- Orchestrate the generation, analysis and reporting of portfolio cash flows under a variety of scenarios and risk factor models.
- Demonstrate a scalable processing system to generate, store, and analyze forward-looking cash flows for very large numbers of ACTUS financial contracts.
- Develop a runtime system capable of processing a portfolio of ACTUS contracts in unison as the time simulation parameter is advanced one month at a time.
- Demonstrate the means to integrate and interoperate financial contracts expressed using the ACTUS standard with other complementary standards, models and/or transactional work flows in order to leverage the real-world benefits of the combined standards.
AWARDS
Why Register?
By registering, you gain exclusive access to ACTUS resources, training materials, and mentorship opportunities. You’ll join a global community of innovators working on groundbreaking financial applications and get the chance to showcase your work to leading financial institutions, regulators, and industry experts.
Top Prize: JACTUS, from Pedro Nahum Rodriguez
The ACTUS Financial Research Foundation is awarding Pedro Rodriguez First Prize in the ACTUS Competition for his JACTUS solution, which:
- delivered a new, complete, open-source implementation of the ACTUS standard contract library written in the Python programming language
- utilized the full suite of the ACTUS test suite library to validate the compliance of the Python implementation to the ACTUS standard
- orchestrated the generation and execution of instances of ACTUS contracts using a Claude AI environment that also provided the means to navigate and analyze the results
Second Tier Prize: Debt Algorand Standard Application, from Cosimo Bassi
The ACTUS Financial Research Foundation is awarding a Second Tier Prize in the ACTUS Competition to Debt Algorand Standard Application (D-ASA), from Cosimo Bassia for
- Delivering a working end-to-end implementation that takes ACTUS
contract definitions and executes them deterministically on the Algorand
Virtual Machine for live on-chain execution of debt instruments, beyond being
used for Simulations and Analytics; - D-ASA executes the contractual logic itself on-chain, so that issuance, lifecycle events, settlement, transfers and cashflows become verifiable operations of the protocol. The panel regarded this considerable effort on the demonstration of the on-chain execution of ACTUS;
- The asynchronous settlement design, while preserving consistency of cashflows and asset transfers across the contract lifecycle, together with role-based institutional controls and native atomic transactions, is of particular note;
- Components packaged as open-source SDK/Framework could give banks and issuers a credible foundation to build standards-aligned tokenization debt
Second Tier Prize: ACTUS-Mentor (Nishanthini S, Harishmitha K, Kaviyaa N, Sherin K Thomas, Dr. S. Thilaga )
The ACTUS Financial Research Foundation is awarding a Second Tier Prize in the ACTUS Competition to Debt Algorand Standard Application (D-ASA), from Cosimo Bassia for
- Delivering a working end-to-end implementation that takes ACTUS
contract definitions and executes them deterministically on the Algorand
Virtual Machine for live on-chain execution of debt instruments, beyond being
used for Simulations and Analytics; - D-ASA executes the contractual logic itself on-chain, so that issuance, lifecycle events, settlement, transfers and cashflows become verifiable operations of the protocol. The panel regarded this considerable effort on the demonstration of the on-chain execution of ACTUS;
- The asynchronous settlement design, while preserving consistency of cashflows and asset transfers across the contract lifecycle, together with role-based institutional controls and native atomic transactions, is of particular note;
- Components packaged as open-source SDK/Framework could give banks and issuers a credible foundation to build standards-aligned tokenization debt
Special Recognition: ContexQ: Graph AI for Enterprise Risk Intelligence & Financial Stability ( Gilbert Kohnke, Ajay Kakarania, Jean-Michel Coeur )
The submission by ContexQ was given a Special Recognition award for its
contribution to enterprise risk management through
- The integration of a graph network layer with ACTUS in order to facilitate systemic risk visibility.
- The use of the inherent ability of ACTUS to create networks of financial interconnection
Demonstrating the creation interlinked networks and then - The use of AI and other methods to evaluate the flow of financial and related risks through such networks.
Special Recognition: ACTUS-I: Extending Algorithmic Financial Contracts into Insurance with High-Performance portfolio projections (Frans Van Ek)
The submission by Frans Van Ek is being given Special Recognition for the efforts at expanding ACTUS to insurance and in evaluating the interaction of insurance and other contracts that provided worthwhile insight into the applicability of the ACTUS algorithmic contract methodology in the insurance domain.
Additionally, by leveraging and demonstrating the high-performance scalability of GPU parallel processing, the work provided an intriguing glimpse of the kinds of analysis that may ultimately become more widely adopted.
Special Recognition: Comprehensive, Standardized, Machine-Readable
Contract Representation (Mark Flood, Elisa Kendall, Pete Rivett, Meng Weng Wong, Matt Wilson)
The work was given a Special Recognition award for presenting an important potential contribution to financial engineering and risk management by:
- The use of automated transformation of legal contracts to machine executable form
- Semantic mapping of ACTUS and the FIBO financial ontology
- Demonstrating the possibility to integrate these technologies into a more comprehensive financial domain ecosystem.
Eligibility
The competition is open to:
- Individuals, teams, or organizations worldwide.
- Innovators from academia, startups, financial institutions, and regulatory bodies.
- Both proprietary and open-source solutions are welcome.
FAQ
Who can apply?
Anyone can apply – individuals (eighteen years and above) and enterprises (including startups) from all geographies are welcome to participate in this global challenge. Both proprietary and open-source solutions are accepted, provided that submissions which do involve proprietary software document the nature and scope of the proprietary components.
Is there a guide for how to register & submit a proposal?
Yes, you can click here to download the guide to Register and Submit your proposal.
Is there a limit on the number of members in a team?
No. There is no such restriction. But all members of a team must be clearly listed and a lead participant nominated to be the point of contact.
Are there any other requirements?
Yes, along with your application, you will need to consent to both the Terms and Conditions of the ACTUS Algorithmic Financial Contracts Use Case Competition and the APIX Terms of Use during the registration process.
Must I be a registered company/firm to participate?
You need not be a registered firm for participation in the hackathon.
How many proposals can I submit?
The ACTUS Competition is designed for participants to propose a single project. The “Proposed Domains” are simply suggestions for your consideration. You need not restrict your proposal to the listed suggestions, however.
Can I submit multiple entries?
No, due to the limitations of both time and intended focus, we require participants to focus on a single proposal.
Is there a cost associated to participate?
The hackathon is free of charge for teams/participants.
Do I need to submit a solution after being shortlisted?
Yes, the shortlisted entities will need to submit and demonstrate a working prototype of their proposed application or solution as part of a presentation that would be evaluated to decide the winners.
How will the winning proposals be selected?
A panel of experts will review all proposals and shortlist the most impactful, feasible, and innovative solutions.
What is the deadline for registrations?
All participants should register their team by November 29, 2025, 11:59 ET.
Will the information shared be kept confidential?
Information provided to us through the online application will be shared only on a need-to-know basis within the relevant event and evaluation teams. The information provided will be retained by us post the program for audit purposes and will not be shared without obtaining explicit permission from the applicant / authorized team member.
Are the participants allowed to leverage their own Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)?
Yes. In fact, participants will need to use their own resources and technical platforms to develop and demonstrate their completed solution or application.
Can I request for re-evaluation in case I am not satisfied with the Judges' decision?
No. Applicants cannot request for re-evaluation. The decision of the judges shall be final and binding. ACTUS reserves all rights with respect to the event.
Who owns the code developed during the hackathon?
Shortlisted entities or teams that choose to submit code as part of their entry in the competition agree to contribute the code to the ACTUS open source community, and will have the option to create a continuing open source project as part of the ACTUS open source community and GitHub. Proprietary applications that are part of an entry in the competition can remain so, but the submitted entry must be able to provide clear evidence and proof of its functionality in a live demonstration in which the solution will be required to respond to interactive requests by judges.
How do I get technical support?
To get technical help, you can write to support@apixplatform.com. Please share the screenshot, URL, and the time when the issue was encountered. ACTUS will provide a separate forum for participants using Discord for public questions and answers for the Competition.