C:\>DIR Global ‘Agentic Regulator’ Hackathon
Terms & Conditions of Participation
Introduction and Acceptance of Terms
These Terms and Conditions (“Terms”) govern participation in the C:\>DIR Global ‘Agentic Regulator’ Hackathon (the “Hackathon”), organised by Fii International (“Fii” and the “Organiser”), as part of C:\>DIR, in collaboration with NayaOne, and other regulatory, academic, technology, and industry partners (collectively, the “programme partners”).
These Terms apply together with our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)]. If there is any conflict between the two, these Terms will apply.
Fii is responsible for the delivery of the Hackathon, including contractual obligations, data controllership, and handling enquiries or complaints.
By registering for, accessing, or participating in the Hackathon in any capacity, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you are registering on behalf of a team or organisation, you confirm that you have the authority to bind that team or organisation to these Terms.
The Hackathon runs from 8 July to 18 September 2026. Participation is free of charge.
2. Eligibility
2.1 Eligibility Criteria
The Hackathon is open to individuals and teams who meet all of the following criteria at the time of registration and throughout the duration of the Hackathon:
Are aged 18 or over;
Are not employees, contractors, or agents of the organisers (Financial Innovation for Impact (Fii)) nor partners or immediate family members of any such individuals;
Are not subject to any criminal conviction, pending prosecution, or sanctions listing (including but not limited to OFAC, UN, EU, or UK sanctions regimes) that would prevent lawful participation or receipt of prize money;
Agree to be bound by the C:\>DIR Global ‘Agentic Regulator’ Hackathon Terms and Conditions, which govern all aspects of participation.
Participants may enter as individuals or as teams. Where an individual participates, they do so in a personal capacity and represent that their participation and any submissions do not breach any obligations owed to their employer or any third party.
Where a team participates on behalf of an organisation, that organisation is responsible for compliance with these Terms, including any indemnities and licences granted under them.
The organisers reserve the right to disqualify any participant or withdraw any offer of prize money where, in their reasonable opinion, participation or award would expose the organisers, Fii or its sponsors and partners to legal, regulatory, or criminal risk and/or liability, and/or material reputational damage. Before any disqualification, the participant will be notified and given a reasonable opportunity to make representations. The organisers will record and retain written reasons for any disqualification decision. Disqualification does not affect any intellectual property rights in materials submitted prior to disqualification.
Participants must complete registration and submit a Concept Note by the stated deadlines. Late or incomplete submissions will not be considered, and no extensions will be granted.
2.2 Who May Participate
The Hackathon is open to participants across three broad categories:
The Authorities: central banks, financial regulators, data protection authorities, ministries of finance, financial intelligence units, payments regulators, competition authorities, communications regulators, and other public bodies;
The Builders: machine learning engineers, LLM application developers, agentic AI architects, data scientists, infrastructure providers, cloud and model providers, and technical builders;
The Experts: professionals from financial services, FinTechs, digital assets and payments, blockchain and smart contracts, anti-scam and financial crime, cybersecurity, academia, and entrepreneurship.
The Hackathon is intentionally multidisciplinary. Technical expertise is not a requirement. Policy specialists, domain experts, governance professionals, and legal practitioners are equally welcome and are encouraged to collaborate.
2.3 Teams
Teams may consist of one or more individuals. There is no maximum team size. Organisations — including regulators, universities, startups, and companies — may register teams or nominate participants. A designated Team Lead must register on behalf of each team.
Where a team participates on behalf of an organisation, that organisation is responsible for compliance with these Terms, including any indemnities and licences granted under them.
2.4 Observers
Public authorities that are not selected for the Build Hackathon may be invited to register as Observers for Demo Day and Live Voting on 15 September 2026. Only public authorities are eligible to register as Observers. Observers may participate in selected showcase and voting activities but are not eligible for prizes.
2.5 Identity and Background Checks
Participant LinkedIn profiles and professional backgrounds may be reviewed as part of the registration process. Participants shortlisted for the Build Hackathon will be subject to screening against applicable sanctions lists. Participants consent to these checks as a condition of participation.
3. Programme Structure and Key Dates
The Hackathon is structured in the following phases:
Preliminary Round: 8 July – 31 July 2026. Teams submit Concept Notes addressing one or more Problem Spaces. Concept Notes must not exceed 1,500 words and must include schematics.
Concept Note Deadline: 31 July 2026. Late or incomplete submissions will not be considered.
AI-Assisted Shortlisting: August 2026. Submissions reviewed through structured assessment, which may include AI-assisted screening and expert review.
Build Hackathon (Final Round): 1–8 September 2026. Shortlisted teams build agentic AI prototypes on the NayaOne platform with access to synthetic datasets, tooling, and expert mentors.
Code Freeze: 8 September 2026.
Virtual Demo Day & Live Voting: 15 September 2026. Teams present to 100+ regulators globally.
Judging Day: 17 September 2026. Top solutions assessed by C:\>DIR Cambridge Regulator Fellows and senior global regulatory leaders.
Winners Announced: 18 September 2026 at the C:\>DIR Summit, Cambridge.
Key dates are indicative and subject to change at the Organiser’s discretion. Participants will be notified of any material changes.
4. Registration and Selection
Participants must register through the official registration portal at https://www.cdir.global/cdir-hackathon.
To be considered for the Build Hackathon, registered participants must submit a Concept Note addressing one or more of the designated Problem Spaces by 31 July 2026.
Submission of a Concept Note does not guarantee selection.
All submissions will be reviewed through a structured assessment process that may include AI-assisted screening and expert review. The Organiser’s selection decisions are final. Individual feedback on Concept Notes will not be provided.
All applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application.
5. Problem Spaces
Teams must select at least one of the Problem Spaces listed on the Hackathon website (https://www.cdir.global/cdir-hackathon) for their agentic prototypes.
6. Participant Conduct and Obligations
6.1 Code of Conduct
All participants are expected to engage professionally, respectfully, collaboratively, and responsibly throughout the Hackathon. The following conduct is strictly prohibited:
Harassment, bullying, intimidation, or discrimination of any kind
Misuse of platform systems, tools, or data
Submission of misleading, false, or plagiarised materials
Any unsafe, unlawful, or unethical behaviour
The Organisers reserve the right to remove any participant from the Hackathon for breach of this Code of Conduct. Except where immediate removal is reasonably necessary due to serious misconduct, participants will be given a reasonable opportunity to respond. Participants may request a review of the decision. Removal does not affect a participant's intellectual property rights in materials submitted before removal.
6.2 Data and Information
Participants must not submit, upload, or incorporate into any prototype or submission:
Confidential supervisory or regulatory information
Classified materials
Real or personally identifiable customer data
Proprietary datasets owned by third parties
unless explicitly authorised in writing by the owner of the relevant data. The Hackathon is designed around synthetic datasets only.
6.3 Mandatory Technical Guardrails
Every prototype must incorporate and demonstrate their approach to the following guardrails:
Human-in-the-loop oversight
Auditability and traceability
Safety and governance controls
Cyber security
Submissions that do not adequately demonstrate these guardrails may be disqualified or downgraded during evaluation.
6.4 Third-Party Tools and Materials
Participants may incorporate pre-existing tools, frameworks, models, or open-source components into their submissions, provided they:
Have the legal right to use them
Comply with all applicable licensing requirements
Properly attribute third-party materials where required
Participants are solely responsible for ensuring their submissions do not infringe the intellectual property rights of any third party.
7. Intellectual Property
7.1 Ownership of Participant IP
Participants retain ownership of all intellectual property they create during the Hackathon (“Foreground IP”). Pre-existing intellectual property owned by a participant or their organisation prior to the Hackathon (“Background IP”) remains the property of the original owner.
7.2 New IP
Participants retain all IP rights in existing solutions and any outputs developed through participation in the Sprint as well as any new work, code, ideas, or outputs created during the hackathon ("Foreground IP"), subject to any rights of their employer or other third parties.
Where a participant is acting in the course of employment or on behalf of an organisation, they confirm that they have authority and all necessary consents to participate in the Hackathon and to grant the rights and licences required under these Terms.
7.3 Licence Grant to Organisers and Programme Partners
By submitting a project, participants grant Fii, and affiliated Programme Partners a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to:
Review and evaluate submitted materials
Publish, demonstrate, and showcase project summaries, demo recordings, screenshots, and presentation materials
Use participant and team names, organisation names, and project descriptions in connection with the Hackathon
Reference projects in educational activities, research publications, conference presentations, reporting, and promotional materials
This license is for a period of 24 months following the end of the Hackathon.
This licence does not permit use in paid advertising, commercial endorsement, or co-branding without the participant’s prior consent.
This licence does not transfer ownership of the underlying IP to the Organiser or Programme Partners.
7.4 No Transfer of Rights
Nothing in these Terms transfers ownership of any participant IP to the organisers. The organisers make no claim to ownership of any submission.
7.5 Third-Party IP Warranty and Indemnity
Participants warrant that their submissions do not knowingly infringe the intellectual property rights of any third party and that they have obtained all necessary licences, consents, or permissions for third-party materials included in their submission. Participants agree to indemnify the Organiser and Programme Partners against any claims, costs, or losses arising from a breach of this warranty.
Any liability of a participant under this indemnity shall not exceed the greater of (a) the value of any prize received by that participant, or (b) USD $1,000.
7.6 Open-Source Licensing
Participants are encouraged — but not required — to release their Foreground IP under an open-source licence (such as MIT or Apache 2.0) to support public-good reuse and cross-jurisdiction collaboration. This is particularly encouraged, but not required, for solutions that are not the proprietary product of an established RegTech, SupTech, or technology firm.
7.7 Confidentiality
Participants acknowledge that, in an open collaboration environment, ideas shared during the hackathon may be seen by other participants, mentors, and judges. Participants may not submit materials that they wish to keep strictly confidential and are responsible for not including proprietary or sensitive information in their submissions.
The Organisers will take reasonable steps to ensure that judges and mentors treat submitted materials as confidential for the purposes of evaluation and participation in the Hackathon, but no obligation of confidentiality applies between participants.
8. Prizes and Awards
A prize pool of up to USD $100,000 is available alongside tickets to Singapore FinTech Festival.
Participants selected for the Final Round will also receive cloud compute credits to support prototype development.
Winners will be announced at the C:\>DIR Summit in Cambridge on 18 September 2026. Additional recognition opportunities, including invitations to present at conference events or enter incubation or accelerator pathways, may also be awarded.
The Organisers reserve the right to withhold, modify, or reallocate any prize only where a winning submission is found to be in material breach of these Terms.
Prizes are awarded gross, without deduction or withholding. Recipients are solely responsible for all tax obligations arising from receipt of a prize, including income tax, withholding tax, and any applicable reporting requirements in their jurisdiction. Participants are advised to seek independent tax advice. The Organisers do not provide tax guidance.
Prize payments will be processed within 60 days following the announcement of winners. The Organisers reserve the right to delay, withhold, or recover any prize payment pending investigation and resolution of any alleged breach of these Terms, including any claim of intellectual property infringement.
9. Judging
Projects will be evaluated in three stages:
End of the Preliminary Round (31 July 2026): Concept notes and schematics will be assessed and teams shortlisted for the final round.
Demo Day (15 September 2026): all shortlisted teams present to 100+ global regulators in a live virtual session, with a public voting element open to registered Observer public authorities subject to final review by a panel of experts.
Judging Day (17 September 2026): top solutions will be assessed by C:\>DIR Cambridge Regulator Fellows, a panel of 15+ senior global regulatory leaders including governors and commissioners.
Projects will be assessed against the following criteria:
Public-sector utility: how directly the prototype supports supervisory, policy, enforcement, or collaboration workflows
Feasibility and operational realism: whether the solution can work within existing regulatory IT, legal, and governance environments
Governance quality and explainability: whether the agent provides traceability, audit logs, rationale trails, and meaningful human oversight
Trust, impact, and innovation: whether the prototype advances market integrity, fairness, consumer protection, resilience, and regulatory effectiveness
Additional factors including scalability and speed to market may also be considered. Judging decisions are final and not subject to appeal.
10. Required Deliverables
Teams participating in the Build Hackathon must submit the following by the Code Freeze deadline of 8 September 2026:
A video demonstration of no more than 5 minutes showing the final prototype
Supporting documentation and source code
Presentation materials
Evidence of human-in-the-loop, auditability and traceability, and safety and governance controls
Teams are also encouraged to outline how their proposed solution can be scaled and transferred across regulatory domains and jurisdictions. Further submission requirements will be communicated to shortlisted participants during onboarding. Incomplete submissions may be disqualified.
11. Use of AI
11.1. Use of AI by participants
Participants are encouraged to use AI to support the development of concept notes and related materials. We does not restrict the use of AI to support the development of prototypes that teams build, where agentic and generative AI use are expected and encouraged, subject to data, confidentiality and intellectual property requirements and within the limits below:
Encouraged uses. AI may be used for research, idea generation, drafting and refining text, language and translation support, summarising material, and writing, debugging, and documenting prototype code.
AI may assist, but not author. The substance of every concept note and problem statement — the framing of the problem, the domain insight, the design choices, and the judgment about why the work matters — must be the team’s own. Efforts will be made by the organisers to monitor for wholly-generated AI content. Submissions that are wholly AI-generated, with little or no substantive human contribution, are unlikely to progress to the Final Round.
Prohibited uses. Participants must not: fabricate data, evidence, sources, or citations; present AI-generated content as original research or analysis without referencing this AI Use Policy; plagiarise; submit AI outputs without human review and verification; or enter confidential, personal, or authority-provided data into public AI tools (see clause 3).
11.2 Data, confidentiality, and intellectual property
Confidential, personal, or non-public authority data must not be entered into public or third-party AI tools. Participants are responsible for complying with the terms of service of each tool and with applicable data-protection requirements. Ownership and licensing of submissions and prototypes are governed by the Hackathon’s terms and conditions and this policy is to be read together with the CDIR Privacy Policy.
11.3. C:\>DIR’s use of AI in evaluation
C:\>DIR may use AI to support human review of submissions, including to organise and triage submissions, summarise them for reviewers, and check for similarity or duplication. The following safeguards apply: (a) AI informs, humans decide; (b) all substantive assessment and final decisions rely on human oversight; and (c) accountability for the process rests with C:\>DIR, not with any automated system.
12. Technology, Platform, and Data
The Build Hackathon will be delivered via the NayaOne platform. Participants will receive platform access and technical orientation during onboarding.
Teams may use a broad range of tools, models, frameworks, and infrastructure providers, subject to these Terms, hackathon rules, and security requirements. Selected cloud infrastructure, APIs, tooling, or platform support may be made available through hackathon sponsors and technology partners.
Synthetic datasets and supporting technical resources may be provided for selected challenge areas. Participants must not use real or personally identifiable customer data in any submission.
13. Privacy and Data Protection
Participant information will be collected and processed by the Organisers as data controller for the purposes of administering the Hackathon, communications, and related programme activities, in accordance with applicable data protection law. Processing is carried out on the basis of legitimate interests in running and managing the Hackathon.
Personal data may be shared with partners involved in delivery of the Hackathon and may be processed outside the UK where necessary for programme administration.
Personal data will be retained for 12 months maximum after the Hackathon and then securely deleted, unless a longer retention period is required by law.
If sanctions screening or criminal conviction checks are carried out, these will be conducted only where lawful under applicable data protection law and subject to appropriate safeguards.
Participants have rights under data protection law including access, rectification, and erasure.
For data protection enquiries, please contact: hackathon@cdir.global.
14. Media, Recording, and Publicity
Sessions, workshops, showcases, and presentations may be recorded, live-streamed, photographed, or otherwise documented for educational, promotional, research, and community purposes.
Participants may be included in such recordings. Separate consent will be obtained where required for the use of personal data, including images or audio of identifiable individuals, for promotional purposes.
15. Liability and Disclaimers
Participation in the Hackathon is at the participant’s own risk.
The Organiser will provide the Hackathon, including any materials, datasets, tools, and platform access, with reasonable care and skill and do not guarantee they will be error-free or suitable for any particular purpose.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Organiser is not liable for indirect or consequential loss or damage, including loss of revenue or reputational harm.
The Organiser is liable for direct loss caused by their negligence or failure to exercise reasonable care and skill, subject to a total aggregate cap of £5,000. This includes loss of data arising from failures of systems within the Organiser’s reasonable control.
Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, and nothing affects your statutory rights.
16. Changes and Cancellation
The Organiser reserves the right to amend these Terms, modify the programme structure, change key dates, or cancel the Hackathon at any time where reasonably necessary. Material changes will be communicated to registered participants.
The Organiser will give at least fourteen (14) days' notice of any material change to these Terms. A material change includes changes to intellectual property rights, liability, prizes, or eligibility.
Participants who do not accept a material change may withdraw from the Hackathon during the notice period without penalty. Any intellectual property rights in materials submitted before withdrawal will be unaffected.
Continued participation following notification of a change constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.
17. Cooling-off (Consumer Participants)
If you are a consumer, you have the right to cancel your participation within 14 days of acceptance of these Terms under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.
If you request access to Hackathon services or materials during the 14-day period, you agree that services may begin immediately and you acknowledge that you will lose your right to cancel once performance has begun.
Business and institutional participants do not have a statutory cooling-off right.
Details of the Organiser and how to contact them, together with information about the Hackathon and complaints procedure, are provided in this document.
18. Withdrawal
A participant may withdraw from the Hackathon at any time by giving written notice to the Organiser.
Withdrawal will not result in any penalty or adverse consequence. Any licence granted or obligations relating to materials submitted before withdrawal will continue to apply.
19. Severability
If any provision of these Terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions will continue in full force and effect.
20. Governing Law
These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales. Any disputes arising in connection with these Terms or the Hackathon shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales, subject to any mandatory provisions of applicable local consumer law which may apply to participants in their country of residence.
21. Contact
For questions or enquiries about these Terms or the Hackathon, please contact: