University of Tennessee
Identify a problem|Develop the solution|Tell your story
Sponsored by the Department of Finance, the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Haslam College of Business.
Identify a problem|Develop the solution|Tell your story
Sponsored by the Department of Finance, the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Haslam College of Business.
At FinTech @ Rocky Top, you learn finance through application and innovation. Start with a problem you care about, maybe from an internship, a class, or just managing your own money. Then build something real to solve it. You'll use vibe coding, the AI coding tools that take you from an idea to a working prototype, no computer science background required. You walk away with a project that's yours, one you can demonstrate and defend in an interview, plus the AI skills employers want and a sharper feel for the finance underneath.
Say "fintech" and most students picture a trading app. Certainly true, but trading apps are only the tip of the iceberg. Financial technology is any tool that helps someone decide, move, track, or protect money. You already use it every day: splitting rent on Venmo, the fraud text from your bank, the credit-score meter in your banking app, autopay on a car loan.
And it runs far more than Wall Street. Hospitals price payment plans. Real estate firms underwrite deals. Insurers flag suspicious claims, restaurants manage cash flow, and blockchains settle transactions. Finance work happens in every industry, and software is how that work gets done. If money moves through a problem, it's fair game here.
Most people arrive with no idea yet. That's normal, and it's exactly what the Resources page is built for.
Open to every UT undergraduate with a problem worth solving.
You leave with a working build and a record of exactly what you did. That's something real to talk about with employers.
You learn to build with AI coding tools, on a problem you picked yourself. When an interviewer asks what you've built with AI, you'll have an answer.
Finance faculty and startup coaches work every Friday session. Industry veterans and fintech folks come through too.
Every fall finalist team gets a flat $1,500, and the spring pays $5,000, $3,000, and $2,000 to the top three. Micro-grants also help cover AI tool access while you build.
Build an app, a dashboard, a workbook, an agent, whatever fits. We judge the finance and whether it actually works, not the format.
It's an on-ramp to the Anderson Center: their startup competitions, their coaches, the whole network. Good projects keep going after the Challenge ends.
We don't care what you build it in, or how complex the code is. It just needs to work and tackle a real finance need. The problem doesn't have to come with a market, either: a tool made for one club, one office, or your own family's books counts the same as something the whole world could download.
In the fall, a large cohort builds together in one room with mentors, then narrows to a handful of finalists. Those few take their project to market in the spring, and it all culminates in Launch Day.
Fall milestones are firm. Spring follows in the new year.
The Challenge runs on small, well-defined roles: reviewer, mentor, judge, speaker, sponsor, connector. Each one is built to respect your time and still give students real help and a real bar to clear.