A team of employees from Liberty IT has won Liberty Mutual Insurances’ 2023 Ignite Hackathon.

The event, which took place in person in Boston and Belfast and virtually, is the global insurance company’s largest internal tech event of the year and is designed to push the bounds of innovation and allow teams to flex their skills and develop solutions to drive the business forward.

Liberty IT develops technologies exclusively for its parent company, Fortune Top 100 Liberty Mutual Insurance. In total 52 teams made up of 252 employees took part in Ignite including seven teams from the industry leader in digital innovation’s Belfast, Dublin and Galway sites.

The overall winning team included five Liberty IT employees and a second team from Liberty IT also took home a prize. The teams showcased the diversity of roles across Liberty from software engineers to consultants and product designers, working together to create innovative solutions.

Brian Craig, Senior Director of Architecture at Liberty IT said: “I am extremely proud of the hard work, dedication and innovation that all 17 teams from Liberty IT showcased at Liberty Mutual’s 2023 Ignite Hackathon. It really demonstrated the limitless potential of our people and our technology, and I can't wait for us to share our Ignite teams’ new ideas and innovations to the rest of the business in the near future.”

“The winning team’s idea focuses on giving business users the ability to customise customer targeting profiles using our existing machine learning models and is set to go into production.”

“In addition, a second Liberty IT team, won the People’s Choice Award with their idea of an Application Programming Interface (API) enabling system to display fraud flags which will enable Liberty Mutual to mitigate risk earlier and increase collaboration amongst fraud teams. We‘re feeling very proud and excited for the future of Liberty IT!” Brian added.

Glenn Horan, Principal Software Engineer at Liberty IT, and a member of the winning team, said: 'Winning the 2023 Ignite hackathon was surreal. We couldn't believe it when Liberty Mutual’s Chief Information Officer, Monica Caldas, called out our name. The standard of competition was so high, and we saw some brilliant pitches on the day. We’re planning on taking the idea through to production over the coming months and it’s great to know that we’ve got the backing of stakeholders at the highest level to make it happen."