SBI has a competition for start-ups! Cash prizes up to Rs 5 lakh for winners

The State Bank of India has announced a competition for start-ups where the winner can bag up to Rs 5 lakh in cash prizes. With this hackathon, named SBI-Predict for Bank 2019, the biggest lender in the country is trying to bolster its measures to check bad loans. In this competition, teams and individuals will have to develop a predictive analytics system which can point out probable loan defaults by SBI's corporate customers. In its financial results for the December quarter this fiscal, SBI reported Rs 1.30 lakh crore in bad loans to corporate sector, out of Rs 1.88 lakh crore gross NPAs for the quarter under review.

The registrations for the ideation phase of the competition, Idea Submission, have been open since January 24, 2019 and will conclude on February 7. Interested developers can submit registrations as individuals or teams of four.

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"Each participant needs to provide idea with process flow on how to develop a predictive analytics model that will most accurately foresee and predict corporate customer loan default using the publicly available data (e.g. news, blogs, forums, websites, court/arbitration centre judgements, social media, stock exchanges, SEBI, rating agencies etc)," according to SBI.

After registrations are closed, competitors will develop and furnish their submission in the 'Prototype Development' round which will be held tentatively between February 12 and March 5.

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"Each shortlisted team will be given with 20 names of SBI Corporate Customers (chosen randomly) in the Hackathon Phase and the team will have to give the probability of default over next 6 months of these customers using publicly available data. Participants whose predictions come closest to the truest i.e. best correlated with real timeframe of 6 months will be awarded," the bank said on the portal for SBI-Predict for Bank 2019.

The selected analytical models will then be used in the bank for getting a warning over probable loan defaults. To check the effectiveness of the selected models, they will be put through tests for six months. So the winners will be declared only after 6 months of submitting the model prototypes. Two models will be selected as first and second winner, and will be awarded Rs 5 lakh and Rs 4 lakh respectively.

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