A team from the State Bank of Pakistan’s Digital Financial Services Group placed fourth globally in the Agentic Payments, Commerce and their Oversight track of the C:>DIR Global Agentic Regulator Hackathon, a competition organized by the Cambridge Digital Innovation and Regulation Initiative and hosted by Financial Innovation for Impact. The SBP team, comprising Ali Muhammad Laghari, Hina Hameed, Nouman Ahmed, and Anum Hamid, competed against entries from central banks, regulators, fintechs, and academic institutions from around the world.
The hackathon launched in July 2026 with backing from the BIS Innovation Hub, the Global Financial Innovation Network, the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum, and more than 35 supporting organizations, including the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Google, SWIFT, Ant International, and the Ethereum Foundation. It was built around six problem areas covering agentic financial advice, payments and commerce oversight, decentralized market infrastructure, fraud and scams, digital identity verification, and market stability, with the goal of helping regulators build practical AI tools to keep pace with fast-moving private sector innovation. The competition drew 360 applications from fintechs, academics, and regulators worldwide during its preliminary round.
SBP’s team advanced through several stages of the competition, first qualifying among the top 36 applicants alongside regulators such as the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, India’s Reserve Bank, and other central banking peers to present a working prototype. The team then progressed to the top 6 finalists, earning a spot to pitch directly before the CCAF judging panel, where finalists had access to synthetic datasets and shared tooling built on the NayaOne technology platform to refine their prototypes ahead of the final presentations. The competition carried a total prize pool of 100,000 dollars and culminated at the C:>DIR Summit on Digital Regulation in the Age of Agentic AI, held in Cambridge on September 18, 2026.
SBP said the prototype developed through the hackathon would contribute to the foundation for its future SupTech initiatives, referring to the use of supervisory technology to modernize how the central bank monitors and regulates the financial sector. No further details were shared on the specific design of SBP’s prototype or how it might be developed further following the competition, though the fourth-place finish places the central bank among a small group of global regulators recognized for early, practical work on applying agentic AI to financial oversight.
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