Student-led Wonky Harvest and Lloyds Banking Group win 2026 Sustainable Finance Hackathon
Student-led Wonky Harvest and Lloyds Banking Group win 2026 Sustainable Finance Hackathon #
A student team tackling food waste and one of Britain’s largest banks addressing community energy costs won the Sustainable Finance Hackathon 2026, co-organised by Finextra Research and ResponsibleRisk, which ran from 1 September to 28 October.
The competition challenged participants to build practical solutions for community-led growth and regenerative finance, and was split into two tracks: one for emerging teams and one for established organisations. Wonky Harvest won the emerging-category prize; Lloyds Banking Group won the established category.
Wonky Harvest was conceived by five university students, Cameron Sajedi, Caue Tomaz, Dhillon Shah, Navaneeth Vijayan and Nizaankan Thayaparan, and centres on redirecting unsold or irregularly shaped farm produce toward university students and local community kitchens. Under the model, students receive starter meals and can earn vegetable boxes by contributing volunteer hours, while ticketed cooking events would generate additional revenue to be shared with participating farms. The design relies on Cosmo-Local Credit pools to aggregate and track commitments across farms, students and kitchens, and uses Burin, an open-source geolocation tool, to verify that farms are local and that meals reach areas of genuine need. Judges cited the proposal’s use of geospatial data, its feasibility and its potential for scalability. The team said it hopes to pilot the model at the University of Manchester.
Lloyds Banking Group won the established category with a proposal called “Financing Microgrids,” put forward by Andrew Torr, Jonathan Steel, Mihail Beshkov, Gwennan Drouillet and Maria Christodoulidou Manitara. The concept would consolidate fragmented household microgrid arrangements into a shared local transformer, letting multiple buildings trade electricity dynamically within a neighbourhood. The team argued the approach could help communities manage rising energy costs, improve uptake of renewable generation and integrate with retrofit planning and green lending programmes, areas where Lloyds has existing commitments.
The 2026 hackathon focused on what organisers described as a “liquidity layer” needed to connect institutional finance with local, social and nature-based assets. Both winning entries addressed that theme through financial mechanism design focused on community benefit rather than purely technological innovation.
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