1. Mildred Prita Rozario December 4, 2016
Eco 42150 Prof. Radhika Jha
Fintech Hackathon Summary
VirBOT, the New Helping Friend to Make Life Easier
The Zahn Innovation Center of CCNY and the RBC Capital Markets gave the CCNY
students an amazing opportunity to challenge themselves- Fintech Hackathon. It was a very
exciting opportunity for my team Bengal Tigers to participate in this mission. My team consisted
of five members, Lucky Islam and I being the business folks, and Mofizur Rahman, Mohammed
Hossain, Jun Li being the tech folks. The competition was for two days taking place at CCNY,
where we were provided with the problem sets to choose from and the tools to use to solve our
chosen problem. The judging algorithm was based on: technical difficulty, innovation,
usefulness, scope attainment and fundability.
My team chose to tackle the problem where we were told to create Chat Bot’s for Client
Queries on Financial Metrics from EDGAR database (medium level difficulty). The proposed
goals were: create an application to answer a broad set of queries on financial data extracted
from the EDGAR database, the list of questions are finite but unknown, plan to code for queries
on Balance sheets that can be answered using the Annual Reports (10k) and Quarterly reports
(10Q) filings on EDGAR. In short, we had to create an application that would list stocks that
have the highest Operating income or Loss in financial services for second quarter of 2016,
identify and rank companies on the basis of negative income for the past 4 quarters and/or two
fiscal years, and provide all new reports published in the last quarter.

2. The reason behind trying make this application was data searching through EDGAR is a
lengthy and time consuming process. Much of the user’s time is spent analyzing financial
statements. Excess resources were spent on analytical employees, such as salaries. Therefore, our
vision was to create a virtual bot that will be cost and time efficient while providing detailed
financial results for RBC users.
In order to create this application, Lucky and I were looking at few companies’ balance
sheets and income statements, such as Microsoft, Facebook, to explain to our tech guys, who
were staying up all night to do the programming of the app. We could not finish making the
application completely, but we reached to the level where we had the demo of our VirBOT.
VirBOT would answer queries. For example, if someone asks, “highest operating income 2nd
quarter 2016?”, VirBOT will retrieve the most recent 10-Q filings of companies with highest
operating income, ranked highest to lowest, such as Facebook $6.225B, Microsoft $5.22B and so
on. The best part about our app was that as VirBOT is utilized by users, it will keep improving
based on the queries. This will help RBC to be cost-effective and better informed.
My team and I learned a lot from being part of this hackathon. It was very hectic and fun
at the same time. Big thanks to my prof. Radhika Jha for encouraging us to participate in this
competition. Although we did not win, we got free t-shirts, goodie bags and an incredible
experience.