Consultancy EY concluded the second edition of its EY Hackathon in India which saw winners developing innovative solutions for solving regulatory and tax related issues and problems.
The first-of-its-kind intelligent automation hackathon challenged teams to develop innovative digital prototypes and applications to help simplify dynamic business functions such as tax, compliance and supply chain among others with the use of disruptive technologies such as robotics process automation (RPA), machine learning, natural language generation and natural language processing.
The participants worked in a 24 hour sprint-like challenge to build prototypes for a selection of unique use cases while being mentored by technology stacks and cloud infrastructure from EY, and its Alliance Partners Automation Anywhere, IBM and Microsoft.
“The tax technology landscape is rapidly maturing and it is imperative for organisations to be agile and ready to deal with this wave of digital disruption. The teams at intelligent automation hackathon worked on some fascinating prototypes and I believe that some of these prototypes will support and benefit the dynamically evolving tax function in India,” said Garima Pande, Tax Partner and National Leader, Business Tax Services, EY India.
The two winning teams were “Ignited Minds” and “Spurs”, from a total of 24 participating teams.
They developed a contract reader tool involving a bot that performs contract completeness check, extraction of relevant clauses, performs applicability checks and subsequently shares the result report, and a model that predicts the most likely rate of tax deducted at source applicable on a particular transaction by reading keywords from the invoice or purchase order and mapping them against the programmed rate master.
“We will continue to create such platforms for integration and co-development among diverse talent communities as we work with businesses to help them feel confident while navigating this uncertain landscape,” said Farokh Balsara, Partner & Markets Leader, EY India.
Team ‘Ignited Minds’ included four engineering students from University School of Information & Communication Technology, while Team ‘Spurs’ included one engineering student from University School of Information & Communication Technology and three EY professionals (Two Chartered Accountants and one engineer).
