SSF & Uthereal - Innovation Lab: “AI in Sustainable Finance”

2 November 2026
Technopark Zurich - Room Cobol (2nd floor)

Content

Have you joined several AI conferences, roundtables and other events? You heard many interesting insights but AI applications still feel remote, theoretical and a bit mysterious to you?

Join us on 2nd November 2026 for a hands-on experience at our exclusive Innovation Lab: a one-day coding sprint on the topic “Artificial Intelligence applications for Sustainable Finance”, at Technopark Zurich.

This mini hackathon is co-organized by Swiss Sustainable Finance and Uthereal, and in collaboration with the Sustainable Digital Finance initiative by ZHAW and UZH. No coding experience is required.

The day brings together small, cross-company teams to design, prototype and stress-test an AI solution to a real sustainable finance challenge. Each team picks its challenge from a pre-designed menu of use cases:

  • Climate risk and scenario analysis

  • Sustainable product design

  • Company sustainability scoring

  • Reporting and disclosures – producing them, or assessing those of others

  • Customer chatbots on sustainable product features

  • Greenwashing detection

“Building” here will mean designing, vibe-coding and stress-testing a solution with AI tools such as Claude Code – a hands-on approach, but made for a business audience. Each team will be joined and supported by an AI engineer from Uthereal, and facilitators are available throughout the day.

The Lab is designed for a small group of 15 to 20 participants from across the SSF member community – business roles, all sectors, all levels of AI literacy.

The day is deliberately structured as a neutral, peer-learning environment: the goal is insight, learning and capability-building, that can then be brought back to day-to-day business life. No confidential company data is needed for this, we will use public data only.

Speakers

Sabine Döbeli

CEO, Swiss Sustainable Finance

Romain Leroy-Castillo

Director Artificial Intelligence and Education, Swiss Sustainable Finance

Wael Abdelmalek

CEO, Uthereal

Jennifer Chang

Head Innovation Hub, SIX Financial Information

Beat Affolter

Professor of Corporate Finance, ZHAW

Jury Member #2

tbd

Jury Member #3

tbd

Schedule

Welcome notes

Sabine Döbeli
Beat Affolter

Framing and Team Formation

A practical introduction to AI, to the coding tools and to what “building an AI solution” will look like.

Romain Leroy-Castillo
Wael Abdelmalek

Discovery Sprint

Teams design the approach: what problem they are solving, who the user is, what data is needed and where in the process one (or more) AI layers can genuinely add value.

Lunch and Informal Networking

Prototyping

Teams build with AI tools – designing prompts, connecting to databases, resting output iteratively – with facilitators available throughout.

Presentation and Jury

Each team presents its solution in front of a jury of financial industry professionals (5' per team). Winning team receives a prize.

Romain Leroy-Castillo
Jennifer Chang
Jury Member #2
Jury Member #3

Closing notes

Closing note on key learnings and what transfers across firms

Romain Leroy-Castillo
Wael Abdelmalek

Networking Apéro

Registration

Please reach out to romain.leroy@sustainablefinance.ch if you would like to participate. Seats are very limited. The event is free of charge.

Location

Technopark Zurich - Room Cobol (2nd floor)

Technoparkstrasse 1, 8005 Zürich, Schweiz
8005 Zürich