World-class minds, world-class challenge: FMTC 2025 in review

The Financial Mathematics Team Challenge (FMTC) is always a highlight of the academic calendar, but more significantly, 2025 was the 10th iteration! 
 
The FMTC is a collaboration between AIFMRM and University College London (UCL). It started in 2014 and is held annually (except for a pandemic hiatus in 2020 and 2021). Four teams competed in the 2025 challenge, each with an academic or industry practitioner mentor, a PhD student team leader and three Master's student team members. This year’s participants came from UCT, Absa, McMaster University, Université de Montpellier, University of Oxford, University of Toronto, and Università Roma.

The 2025 prizegiving was held on Friday, 11 June, after two days of team presentations. In his address, AIFMRM Director Professor David Taylor said: “We watch you rise year after year to this challenge, and see it seep into your minds that you are world-class students, in a world-class programme, who’ll go on to be world-class in whatever capacity you want.”

Professor Andrea Macrina from UCL congratulated the teams, saying, “The challenge wouldn’t have happened without all of you.”

The winners of this year’s challenge were Team 2. Congratulations to Team Leader Davide Feleppa from Università Roma, and UCT team members Nehelo Chilenje, Cameron Fellner and Mandisa Daba!

Leandro Sánchez-Betancourt, an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford and mentor of the winning team, commented that the problem he set is a stochastic game formulation of a recent paper published in the SIAM Journal of Financial Mathematics. A solution to this problem is unknown, challenging, and a very good contribution to the literature.
 
“The students did a superb job. They went above and beyond what I had in mind when posing the problem,” Professor Sánchez-Betancourt said. “For example, they found a testable hypothesis for the level of cooperation and competition among market makers. This could have implications for the regulation of high-frequency market makers.”

“The word that keeps popping up in reference to the FMTC is opportunity,” Professor Macrina said. “At AIFMRM and during the FMTC, we give each other opportunities by forgetting boundaries so we can all grow.”
 
A heartfelt thanks to Riskworx for sponsoring the FMTC; to the team mentors, who took time from their busy schedules to join us for an even busier two weeks; to our team leaders; and to the AIFMRM academic staff. A special mention goes to AIFMRM’s Dr Khouzeima Moutanabbir for reading the four reports in 36 hours!

We look forward to the next FMTC, which will take place in 2027, as we intend to rework the competition next year.