A three-month statewide competition to build personal financial management software — budgeting, insurance, portfolios, goals, estates. Open to Kentucky college students and graduates of the last three years. Funded and judged by Kentucky RIAs, banks and broker-dealers, and every winning app stays free to the public, permanently.
Sponsor the challenge What sponsors getSponsorship closes September 15, 2026. Firms that commit before then are named on every page of the challenge.
100% of sponsor money becomes prize money. Globefin runs the platform, the review and the judging at no cost to the pool. If we don't reach $10,000, nothing is charged and the challenge is postponed.
Every mainstream personal-finance tool is a subscription that wants a bank login. Households unwilling to hand over credentials — and the firms unwilling to ask them to — are left with a spreadsheet and a legal pad. Kentucky has the financial talent to specify better tools and the universities to build them. Nobody has put the two in a room and paid for the result.
Every app built here is a single HTML file that opens in a browser with no account and no install. An app may call a public service to look something up — a rate, a share price — but it may never send a person's own financial details anywhere. That's a hard rule, and we check it.
For a firm handing a tool to a client, that's the whole point: no vendor, no subscription, no breach exposure, no privacy conversation.
A single file still runs in ten years. Download it once and it is yours — no renewal to miss, no company to go under, no version that stops working. Where an app uses an outside service, it has to keep working without it.
Sponsor money spent here buys a permanent public asset, not a one-off event.
Three months of work, a finished tool, and a public page with their name on it. That is a far better hiring signal than a résumé, and you see it before you interview.
Every entrant may opt into a résumé book shared with sponsoring firms — not just the winners.
There is no overhead to subtract and no fee to explain. Contributions are pooled, the pool is split among the three winners, and each firm's share of the vote is its share of the pool. Move the number and see it.
Target is $25,000. Adjust to see how the prizes change either way.
No single firm may hold more than 25% of the vote, however large its contribution. Weight above the cap is redistributed to the other sponsors.
We don't want to promise an amount we haven't raised, and we don't want to cap what an entrant can win if Kentucky's financial industry shows up. Publishing the split rather than the dollar figure means the prize is honest at every level of funding — and every firm that joins raises the prize for everyone.
Sponsors are the people who know what a household in Bowling Green or Pikeville needs from a budgeting tool. Weighting the vote by contribution means the firms carrying the most risk on the outcome have the most say in it — and the cap means the challenge can't be bought by one firm.
A challenge decided by a single large sponsor is worth nothing to the winner and nothing to the sponsors' reputations. The 25% ceiling is what makes a $1,000 firm's participation meaningful — and it's what lets every sponsor say, truthfully, that the result was collective.
Globefin absorbs the platform, hosting, technical screening, arithmetic verification and judging administration. None of it comes out of the pool.
This is not a logo on a banner. Four of these are things you would otherwise pay a recruiter or a software vendor for.
Sponsors vote on the finalists, weighted by contribution. Not a panel, not a committee — the firms who funded it.
Five guaranteed first-round interviews across participating firms for the five strongest entrants, plus an opt-in résumé book of every entrant.
Every person in that pool is a current student or a graduate of the last three years, and each of them spent three months finishing something, unsupervised.
Winning apps are published under an open licence. Put them on your own site, brand your copy, hand them out at a seminar. No licence to negotiate and nothing to pay.
Sponsors above a threshold may name a category award — the [Firm] Prize for Insurance Planning, for instance — carried on the app's page permanently.
Sponsors are invited to run a mid-challenge briefing: thirty minutes on what your side of the industry needs from a planning tool, streamed to every entrant and kept on the page.
It measurably improves submissions, and it is the cheapest credible positioning a firm can buy.
Free financial tools, built by Kentucky students, given away permanently. Sponsors are named in every announcement, on the challenge page, and on the winning apps.
Nothing about the schedule moves once sponsorship closes. Sponsors are asked for roughly two hours in total, all of it in December.
Firms commit. The pool, the prize amounts and the sponsor list are published before a single entry is accepted, so entrants know exactly what they're competing for.
Twelve weeks. Entrants build a single-file web app to Globefin's published requirements. Optional sponsor briefings at week three and week eight.
Globefin staff check every entry for eligibility, single-file compliance, accessibility, and arithmetic against worked examples with known answers. Where an app calls an outside service we verify it sends no personal data and still works when that service is pulled. Entries that fail don't reach you.
Ten finalists, each with a two-minute walkthrough video and a live app. Sponsors rank their top three. Weighted, capped, and tallied publicly. Winners announced January 8, 2027.
Screening is deliberately separated from judging. Sponsors should be deciding which good tool is best for Kentucky — not checking whether an amortisation schedule is correct. That's our job, and we do it before anything reaches a ballot.
The cash is the headline. For someone at this stage of a career, the other two are worth more.
| Place | Share | What the winner receives |
|---|---|---|
| First | 60% | Cash prize, permanent listing, and immediate consideration for Globefin Basics designation — the app Globefin points every visitor at for that job, worldwide. |
| Second | 30% | Cash prize and permanent listing in the Demos gallery under the entrant's own name and licence. |
| Third | 10% | Cash prize and permanent listing. |
| Top five | — | A guaranteed first-round interview with a participating sponsor firm. Every entrant is a current student or a graduate of the last three years, so the five who reach you are the strongest of a field you'd want to be hiring from. |
| Every entry | — | Considered for Basics designation on its merits, whether or not it places. A category nobody has built for yet is the easiest way onto the shelf. |
Eligibility. Entrants must be 18 or older on the opening date and either enrolled at a Kentucky college or university, or a Kentucky resident enrolled at a college or university anywhere. Graduates qualify where the degree was conferred within three years of the closing date. Entrants keep ownership of what they build; publication is under an open licence with the author's name attached, and they can withdraw it at any time. Prizes of $600 or more require a completed W-9 and are reported on Form 1099-MISC.
One category, deliberately wide: comprehensive planners, budgeting and cash flow, insurance needs, portfolio rebalancing, goal planning, estate inventories, debt payoff, taxes. A single sharp calculator competes with a sprawling planner on the same question — does this do a real job properly for the person who needs it?
Every entry is one HTML file that opens with no install and no account. It may call a public service for a rate or a price, but never transmits the user's own financial details, and has to keep working when that service is unavailable. Submissions carry an educational-use disclaimer and may not make personalised investment recommendations.
The full scope is on the challenge overview, and the technical brief at globefin.org/webapp-requirements.
Any amount from $500 is welcome and carries proportional voting weight. These are the points where something extra unlocks.
Nothing here is a commitment. It reaches the challenge organiser directly, and you'll get the full terms, the ballot design and an invoice to review before anything is signed.
Within two business days you get a reply from a person, with the full terms, the ballot design, the sponsor naming language, and a draft invoice.
Nothing is charged until the pool clears $10,000. If the challenge doesn't reach its floor, commitments are released and no invoice is issued.
Your compliance team goes first. Several firms are reviewing the same document; we're happy to take a call with your CCO and to adjust disclosure language.
This is the first running. The vote cap, the prize split, the interview commitment and the judging criteria are all still open, and firms that come in before September 15, 2026 get a say in what they become. After that they're fixed and published, and they don't move.
Sponsorship funds a prize pool. It is not compensation to a promoter for referring clients, and no entrant is asked to say anything about your firm. Sponsors are named as sponsors, nothing more — which is the same answer whether your review runs through the Advisers Act Marketing Rule, FINRA's communications rules, or a bank's own marketing approval process.
We will send your compliance team the full terms, the ballot design and the exact sponsor naming language before you commit, and we will accommodate any disclosure wording they require. Advisors, broker-dealers and banks are reviewing the same document; the questions get answered once.
No, and the rules forbid it. Submissions are educational calculators and planning tools. They may not recommend specific securities, and every entry must carry an educational-use disclaimer. Screening rejects anything that doesn't.
The architecture helps here. An app may look something up — a rate, a price — but it may not send the user's own financial details anywhere, and it holds nothing afterwards. No client information passes to your firm, to Globefin, or to the entrant.
Kentucky college students and graduates of the last 3 years, and nobody else. Full eligibility on the challenge overview.
Narrowing it this way is deliberate. It costs a few submissions from working developers and buys something worth more to you: every person in the pool is someone you could plausibly hire, which is what makes the résumé book and the interviews useful rather than ceremonial.
Speak to your accountant. For most firms this is treated as an ordinary marketing and recruiting expense rather than a charitable contribution. We will invoice it that way and provide documentation of what the sponsorship purchased.
One first-round conversation with a candidate we have screened, at a time you choose, within ninety days of the announcement. It is not an offer, not a second round, and not a commitment to any candidate you are not able to employ.
Candidates are told exactly this, in these words, before they enter.
The screening round exists for this. If fewer than the threshold number of entries pass screening, sponsors are notified before voting and may choose to roll the pool into the next cycle or have it returned.
Sponsors are never asked to award a prize to something they don't think deserves one.
Funds are held by Globefin, segregated, and disbursed only as prizes. Nothing is charged until the $10,000 floor is reached. If the challenge does not run, commitments are released.
Sponsoring firms and their employees may not enter, and may not vote for an entry by a family member. Any sponsor with a relationship to a finalist recuses that portion of their vote, which is redistributed.
Three months, a few thousand dollars, and Kentucky ends the year with a set of financial tools any family in the state can download and keep — plus five candidates you'd never have met.
Commit to sponsor Work out the numbers
Here to build something rather than fund it?
The entry page is over here.
Kentucky PFM Challenge
admin@globefin.org