About the Hackathon
The Securities Market Hackathon, powered by BSE, CDSL, KFINTECH, NSDL and SEBI, brings together India’s brightest minds to solve real-world problems in securities markets. Held during GFF2025, the world’s largest fintech festival, this challenge invites digital-first solutions that empower retail investors and enhance transparency, efficiency, compliance, and accessibility across capital markets. This platform aims to catalyze responsible, tech-led innovation aligned with SEBI’s vision.
Problem Statements
Fraud prevention
Problem: Fraudsters employ a range of deceptive tactics to exploit or mislead investors. Some examples of such tactics are as follows:
Fraudulent advisors (often impersonating Investment Advisors / Research Analysts / Brokers) and Ponzi schemes luring investors with promises of high returns, often promoted through fake websites or social media.
Circulation in social media, of deepfake videos / audios of corporate leaders or fabricated regulatory letters of approvals / fines, announcing fictitious events triggering stock price movements.
Fraudsters exploiting WhatsApp and Telegram groups to disseminate misleading stock market tips, orchestrating coordinated buying or selling to manipulate stock prices (e.g., pump-and-dump schemes)
Fraudsters posing as registered intermediaries (Merchant bankers, custodians) luring general public / investors through social media apps to invest in IPOs with promise of firm allotment.
Fake trading apps, often using names or designs similar to trusted firms lure investors with promises of high returns and user-friendly interfaces. Victims deposit funds, but trades are fictitious, often show fake portfolio gains to encourage large investments before disappearing with funds.
Sometimes, certain listed companies issue misleading or false corporate announcements on stock exchanges, ultimately leading to investment by retail investors based on false narratives and market manipulation.
These activities cause financial losses to retail investors, erode their trust in the securities market and undermine market integrity.
Outcome: Develop a tool/solution to help prevent one or more types of such frauds. For example:
An app that scans online platforms, identifies suspicious investment offers / videos / audios / documents, and verifies advisor credentials against regulatory database – a prototype that flags high-risk promotions or advisors and provides a user-friendly interface for investors to check legitimacy.
A solution that monitors social media platforms, identifies suspicious stock tips, links them to unusual market activity, and provides a dashboard for regulators or exchanges to take action. The solution should respect user privacy while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.
An application to ingest corporate announcements from stock exchanges, cross-verify the same through various means (disclosure from counter-party listed company, historical filings, information in public domain etc.) and caution media houses / investors about fraudulent announcements. It can also provide a rule based or AI based credibility scoring to the announcements (e.g. mismatch in historical performance vs sudden claims).
Context: Aligned with SEBI’s Safe space initiative to protect retail investors from fraud in securities market.
Enhancing Retail Investor Education and Engagement
Problem: Many retail investors lack the knowledge to navigate the securities market, leading to poor investment decisions or reliance on unverified advice. Further, most of the online sources of information for retail investors are in English and thus there is lack of educative material in various vernacular languages.
Outcome: Develop an interactive app that educates users on stock market basics, risk assessment techniques, algo trading / HFT and portfolio diversification using delayed market data and simulated trading scenarios - a prototype app with engaging tutorials, quizzes, and a virtual trading feature that tracks learning progress. Or develop a prototype app that can translate into vernacular languages and summarise material available on other sites, such as websites of SEBI / NISM / stock exchanges.
Context: Inspired by SEBI’s push for investor education and financial literacy.
Improving Liquidity in Bond Markets
Problem: Corporate bonds often face low trading volumes, making it hard for investors to buy or sell securities. Design a platform that match buyers and sellers, provides price discovery and/or incentivizes participation through features like fractional ownership.
Desired Outcome: A functional prototype that enhances trading activity and transparency in illiquid markets. Tokenisation based solutions which can provide additional benefits are also invited.
Context: Draws from challenges in increasing liquidity of corporate bond markets in India.
Member Compliance Monitoring
Problem: The eligibility criteria for becoming a member of the stock exchanges, along with the applicable ongoing compliances requirements, are predefined. Over the years, with an aim to protect the integrity of the market and protection of investor interest, there has been paradigm shift in compliance requirement and also monitoring of client behaviour. The large brokers have capability & resources either to build relevant systems in house or deploy third party systems, the Small & Medium size brokers face challenges in deploying such systems due to their size of business.
Desired Outcome: A low-cost tool / service for measuring the overall performance of the entity including business assessment, compliance, surveillance and reporting features.
Context: Ease of doing compliance and effective surveillance by Small / Mid-size brokers.
Eligibility Criteria
Who Can Apply?
Startups
Students (undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral)
Individuals (Tech professionals, market researchers, and other)
Fintech, RegTech, WealthTech & Capital Markets solution teams
Team Composition:
1 to 5 members
Interdisciplinary teams encouraged
Evaluation Criteria
Solutions will be judged based on:
Market Impact of product/process: Depth of improvement in market infrastructure, investor safety, investor access, or compliance.
Technology Stack: Use of advanced tech (AI/ML, LLMs, block chain, NLP, Digital Public Infrastructure etc.) having robust cyber security.
Feasibility: Real-world deployability & ease of implementation.
Scalability: Potential to scale scope of operation, number of users, number of transactions, velocity etc.
Alignment with SEBI’s Mandate: Investor protection, Market development and Supervision.
