A student team from Nanjing University won a national financial innovation application competition at the weekend.

The Nanjing University team called Inmotion won the $10,000 first prize with their arbitrage system for treasury futures, at the competition held at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

The competition sponsored by Citi China started in 2005 and aims to encourage the wider application of technology in the financial industry, and promote industry development. More than 12,000 college students and 1,300 teachers have taken part in the competition over the past decade.

This year's competition, launched in March 2014, received submissions from 188 teams from 63 universities, including eight cross-university teams and two cross-country teams.

"Information technology today is consumed very differently, and it is changing the financial services industry in an unprecedented way. As such, there is a dire need for financial innovation, for example, via hi-tech applications, to help financial institutions adapt to this change," said Andrew Au, CEO of Citi China.

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