A Winning Combination: Bocconi Students and Professor Triumph at SwissHacks 2026
A blend of knowledge, innovation and teamwork between Bocconi students and their professor led to victory at the SwissHacks 2026 international hackathon in Zurich last month. Luca Amigoni, Giulio Sighieri and Yucheng Zhong, all students of the MSc in Data Science and Business Analytics, and Max Yakubovskiy, WBB student, together with Adam Polak, assistant professor in the Department of Computing Sciences, triumphed with their idea for reimagining, with AI, client-manager relations in private banking.
SwissHacks 2026 is one of Switzerland's biggest fintech hackathons, initiated by the Swiss government agency State Secretariat for International Finance (SIF), bringing together students, developers, entrepreneurs, and innovators for a 48-hour challenge in Zurich. Participants work in teams to solve real-world problems in finance, build creative prototypes, and pitch their ideas to industry experts. It saw the participation of 42 teams this year.
“As we discussed back in February about entering as a team we thought of asking prof Polak, whose course in Algorithms we were following at the time, to join us and he said that while it was an uncommon request he was very happy to team up with us,” says Giulio. “And once we arrived in Zurich at the event we met Max, a student of the World Bachelor in Business program who had spent a year at Bocconi, and also took him aboard our team.”
In Zurich the team entered the section of the competition devised by Julius Baer. The challenge focused on reimagining digital banking for private banking clients - designing innovative banking experiences that make wealth management more intuitive, personalized, and secure, while still supporting the close relationship between clients and their relationship managers.
“The challenge was very intense. We spent many hours discussing possibilities, also through interaction with representatives of Julian Baer, and then worked all through the night developing our product idea and the necessary software,” says Giulio. “Our idea was a relationship management product that uses AI to analyze in real-time the conversation between a manager and a client and provide immediate and effective recommendations and tips.”
“On the second day we presented and pitched our idea to the jury and it was great satisfaction to come out top of our section,” says Giulio. “It was a great team effort and very satisfactory to put into real-world practice what we had learned in class.”
“I've never participated in a hackathon before and am very happy the students invited me to join. I've learned a lot from my teammates during those very intense 48 hours,” says prof Polak. “It is almost a cliché in private banking that human relationships are the cornerstone, but it turned out very true at the hackathon, where technical skills were only part of the success. Both relationships within the team, where we had to very quickly learn to trust each other and put teamwork over personal agendas, and with the business partners, in order to correctly understand them and their needs, were crucial.”
