AI Hackathon 2026

Copenhagen – February 19, 2026 – SimCorp, a global leader in financial technology, announced today it will partner with Microsoft to launch AI Hackathon 2026, the largest innovation event in SimCorp’s history.

Starting on February 23rd, and ending on February 27th, 2026, AI Hackathon 2026 will bring together up to 2,000 SimCorp employees across more than 20 locations spanning Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. The goal of the event is to get hands-on with frontier AI innovation, build new skills, and develop new agentic solutions to deliver client outcomes and enhance operational efficiency across the firm.

"We are very excited to partner with Microsoft to make this milestone event happen,” said Marc Schröter, Chief Product and Technology Officer at SimCorp. “The AI Hackathon 2026 is an important initiative to further embed AI in our products and in the way we work, enabling SimCorp to generate more value for our clients. We want to keep pushing the boundaries when it comes to product innovation.”

SimCorp integrates AI capabilities across its investment management platform, SimCorp One, helping clients automate workflows, enhance decision-making, and manage increasingly complex portfolios. With AI Hackathon 2026, SimCorp aims to accelerate AI innovation that delivers real value to its clients – among them some of the world’s largest asset managers and asset owners. 

Hackathon teams will compete across six challenge categories that reflect SimCorp’s strategic focus areas:

• AI for Product Innovation - deliver coherent intelligent experience across the entire investment value chain.
• AI for Accelerating Software Development Lifecycle - increase productivity across the entire software development lifecycle.
• AI for Platform Operations - capture economies of scale from AI development and drive efficiency gains in SaaS operations.  
• AI for Standardization - improve scalability for software implementations.  
• AI for Onboarding Acceleration - accelerate time to value for SimCorp clients.  
• AI for Operational Efficiency - streamline internal workflows. 

AI Hackathon 2026 is one of the largest client hackathons that has ever been supported by Microsoft in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. It draws on Microsoft’s proven Global Hackathon model - a multi-day, company-wide innovation format created by The Microsoft Garage that brings thousands of employees together worldwide to create, experiment, and build at high speed. Inspired by this approach, AI Hackathon 2026 combines dedicated pre-event learning sessions with an intensive, hands-on build phase, enabling participants to rapidly prototype ideas and collaborate seamlessly across locations.

"The SimCorp AI Hackathon 2026 is a great example of true partnership where Microsoft is working together with our customers to drive innovation,” said Clare Barclay, President, Enterprise & Industry EMEA at Microsoft. “By bringing together our global teams from around the world in a collaborative hands-on environment, we’re able to move faster from idea to prototype for rapid impact to the business."

Across the investment management industry, AI adoption is accelerating. According to SimCorp’s recent InvestOps Report, which surveyed 200 global buy-side executives, investment firms are increasingly prioritizing innovation and AI capabilities to drive business outcomes. The study showed that 70 percent of investment managers worldwide now use AI to support their front office and that, for the first time in three years, innovation is now the leading driver of technology-related investments, ahead of cost control and operational efficiency.

Finalists will be evaluated by a panel of senior leaders from SimCorp and Microsoft, assessing solutions for innovation, feasibility, and potential impact. Winners of the AI Hackathon 2026 by SimCorp and Microsoft will be announced on March 10th.