Before starting your internships, you participated in the TechTalents program by TechQuartier – an initiative that is supported by Deutsche Börse Group. Congrats on winning one of the awards! What was the challenge and your winning product?

Anthea: The TechTalents format is a competition with educational elements for tech enthusiastic students from all over the world, with various skillsets, who are passionate about creating digital business solutions. The participating teams were provided with real-world business opportunities which all student groups solved over the course of eight weeks. Every group got matched with a corporate mentor who supported them throughout the competition. For us, it was Tim Henning from the Business Strategy & Analytics team of Deutsche Börse's Trading & Clearing division – who offered us the chance to come onboard as interns within his project after the programme ended.

The concrete challenge for Deutsche Börse was to develop a tool that quantifies and visualizes the positive sustainability impact of a company’s financial commitment through, for example, charity donations. We approached this by calculating impact scores based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) logic, which lead to concrete ESG impact indicators – and thus make the company’s commitment transparent and measurable.

Mostafa: Our final product ”vESGualize” enables the user to evaluate which SDGs are impacted by donations, how relevant they are, and what relative impact they have in the context of the world’s most critical environmental and social needs. With that, positive impactful commitments like donations can be targeted and placed in the most effective way. Our long-term goal is to support businesses to make the future greener and fairer.

During the competition, you gathered a lot of insights into ESG topics. Are you continuing to work in this field during your three month-internship at Deutsche Börse Group?

Anthea: At Deutsche Börse, we’ve had the chance to present our solution to various teams and executives. We were thankful to receive very constructive and helpful feedback. Regarding our current responsibilities, we are continuing to work with the topic of ESG during our internship. We are now fully involved in the preparations for an innovation project with a sustainability impact where we are responsible for the digital market implementation strategy and execution within the project team.

Mostafa: We can now utilize our newly acquired ESG knowledge and continue to learn and grow. Right now, we are working with a larger number of experienced professionals where we are developing the web and app implementations across several online presences, with lots of ownership and freedom to work creatively.

What do you study and how does your academic background shape your experience at Deutsche Börse?

Mostafa: We both study computer science – Anthea at Goethe University Frankfurt and me at RWTH Aachen. Our academic field certainly helps with the technical implementation of our ideas, both during the competition and our internship.

Anthea: Furthermore, computer science incorporates many aspects: in our studies, writing code and optimizing algorithms require us to become creative and find our own out-of-the-box solutions. So, while both the market implementation and scaling strategy, which are part of our work here at Deutsche Börse Group, do not seem very “techy”, they still tie in well with our academic background. And, of course, the web and app implementations we work on require tech knowledge.

What is the most exciting part of your internship?

Mostafa: For me it’s definitely the collaborative work with our team when we together meet for brainstorming sessions, which always lead to new ideas, better approaches and surely lots of fun. Interns have as much voice as the directors, and it is a very professional yet collegial environment. Of course, to see our project come to life and to realize the impact our work can make is a great experience.

Anthea: Being able to continuously contribute with your own ideas and take on responsibility for the products of our work. As interns, we definitely feel like valuable and fully integrated members of the team and have the chance to shape key aspects of our project.

How did the internship contribute to your professional and personal development?

Mostafa: We were able to learn a lot about finance, trading, and sustainability, all highly relevant as well as interesting fields that did not play a role in our studies before. What I have realized for myself personally: when it comes to sustainability, even small steps do make a difference.

Anthea: I agree. As computer science students, these topics were usually not on our agenda before, and ESG and sustainability are now very close to our hearts. Additionally, we got the chance to host the global capital markets call with hundreds of colleagues participating – a huge opportunity to once again broaden our investment and markets understanding, as well as our presenting skills. There is no question that we can make positive impact with the work we do, which is something we will be taking with us from the internship to both our lives and careers.