Finovate Day 2 Morning Recap and Ratings

We’re into Day 2 here at Finovate. Bank Innovation has been following the presentations and here’s our recap and ratings for your reading pleasure.

SESSION 1

Finovera

Finovera is a tool for simplifying and managing your financial life. Users can organize various accounts and pay bills without dealing with a stack of paper bills. It’s like a feature-rich billpay and gets data without the need to sign into the various accounts. The top navigation is strongly reminiscent of Facebook – does that count as a feature or bug?

Cool Factor: 3
I Want It: 3
Revenue Potential: 3

Signifyd

A product from the PayPal mafia, Sygnifyd is billed as being insurance for efinance. Its software aims to improve on the manual review process for risky transactions with automation. The automated process checks various sources such as LinkedIn and Facebook to verify the ID of purchasers. Social data saves time and friction for easier risk mitigation. Using power of social media to save time and cost with agents? Good idea.

Cool Factor: 4
I want It: 3
Revenue Potential: 4

Finect

Finect is a social media site for the regulated industry. It counts 50,000 users in Europe after two years of operation. The site verifies financial services professionals through its partnership with Discovery Data. Finect has done some deep thinking about compliance that other social media sites will never do. It allows the setup of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts from a secure, compliant environment. It also allows the viewing of investments in real time.  Executives can track employees’ reach on social media sites and generate reports for compliance.

Cool Factor: 4
I Want It: 4
Revenue Potential: 3

LICUOS

LICUOS is an open payment platform for businesses to reduce debt rather than just pay them. the company hails from Spain where they know a thing or two about corporate debt. Invoices are aggregated into the site and algorithms determine the optimal way to pay. The platform also allows payments netting services and 200 European companies have requested funding its lending platform. It’s not just about reducing fees and improving cashflow — the company is a wide-open payments platform.

Cool Factor: 4
I Want It: 3
Revenue Potential: 3

Fiserv

Fiserv has added a new feature to Mobiliti: snap-to-tag mobile bill capture. Users photograph a physical receipt and Fiserv extracts the data to populate the online banking platform and associate the data with a transaction. This seems like a good option for expense tracking and businesses, but consumers bother to take photographs of pieces of paper?

Cool Factor: 3
I want It: 3
Revenue Potential: 3

Encap

Widely deployed in Scandinavia, Encap’s security software recognizes a customer’s device, PIN, and biometric data for three-factor authentication for digital banking login. It uses a QR code to generate PIN code for logins. Though touted as simple, it seemed like a lot of clicks to authenticate, but demos are a tricky business that way.

Cool Factor: 3
I want It: 2
Revenue Potential: 3

Kofax

Imaging software veteran Kofax uses the power of the smartphone camera to capture data from drivers’ licenses and other documents. This can serve for both identity authentication and data population for account origination. Employing the smartphone for easier account opening shows promise for capturing the attention of the fickle, phone-addicted Gen Y’s among us.

Cool Factor: 4
I want It: 4
Revenue Potential: 3

FlexScore

Rebranding is a good thing. FlexScore, formerly known as LeapScore offers financial advice and another kind of credit score for customers. It scores customers in 14 different financial categories and guides users toward achieving goals. It’s free to the user, which is cheaper than a financial adviser. FlexScore offers a gameified approach, if you consider pursuing goals games, and comparison to peers. It was a very intense, almost religious presentation with dueling laptops. It was hard to look away.

Cool Factor: 3
I want It: 2
Revenue Potential: 3

BBC Easy

BBC Easy offers a commercial lending interface for bankers and borrowers to share.  Online loan applications mean no need to drop off papers at the branch, and the approval process can be sped up with with snappy presentation of key data. providing all a banker needs to know to ok a loan. The company’s promise is loan approval, monitoring and business intelligence for banks to help businesses.

Yseop

Yseop’s artificial intelligence engine writes natural language reports to help bankers become financial advisers. It builds customer profiles in a bank’s CRM, highlighting key data points. It then generates reports incorporating as many as 4,000 data points. The software lives on bank servers and can helps with cross-sell and user acquisition. Reminiscent of yesterday’s presenter Narrative Science

Cool Factor: 4
I want It: 3
Revenue Potential: 4

Balance Financial

Balance offers a collaborative workspace tool for bankers and customers to work together. Integrated chat and messaging in the platform facilitates fast communication and problem-solving. Data paints a picture of the client’s financial picture for an adviser to see. Collaboration is good — banking is about relationships. Sharing of secure documents related to mortgages or other sensitive transactions is better than nonsecure means such as fax or email. 1200 financial teams use the solution.

Cool Factor: 4
I Want It: 3
Revenue Potential: 3

TipRanks

Israeli startup TipRanks rates advisers and bloggers on their predictions using web search. The cloud-based service operates as a browser plugin that can be called up on any page to check on an analyst, compare him to peers, and look at past performance. Analysts usually recommend buy, and are wrong 50.2% of the time, so knowing analysts is key. The revenue model and mobile capabilities of the service are unclear.

Cool Factor: 4
I Want It: 4
Revenue Potential: 3

Intuit Financial Services

Intuit announced Mint My Business – call it BFM. Mint has 12 million users and is about to get more as the product is whitelabelled. Mint’s familiar formula of categorization and budgeting and goals are now available within the FIs banking experience. And Mint id offering tools and analysis to 21 million small businesses. Users can now split budgets and transactions into Business or Personal. Small businesses and consumers have a lot in common, so Mint for Business is much needed.

Cool Factor: 4
I want It: 3
Revenue Potential: 4

GoNow

Smartphone-based ewallets don’t work most places. GoNow aims to expand the arena with its app and reprogrammable card. The card can become any card, even gift and loyalty cards, with the click of a button — shades of Dynamics and Wallaby. Retailers don’t need to make any changes. The product is called Magikwallet and offers a pin login — bonus. In a whitelabelled environment, banks can set a default top of wallet card. The interface and hardware looked a bit cumbersome but it attacking a real pain point.

Cool Factor: 3
I want It: 2
Revenue Potential: 3

Credit Sesame

Previous Finovate Best in Show winner Credit Sesame announced its mobile product, with new features launching later this month. The app monitors a user’s credit and loans and presents targeted loan offers. The demo used a slideshow – aren’t those forbidden? Mortgages are always challenging on the small screen. The app is integrated with real estate listings site Trulia.

Cool Factor: 3
I want It: 4
Revenue Potential: 3

IntelliResponse

IntelliResponse presented virtual customer service agents. The first avatar resembled Ask Jeeves for finances. Customers can ask questions in natural language and get one response — not 2300. This saves expensive calls to the contact center. IntelliResponse tested the patience of the crowd with numerous spammy tweets before the presentation. The functionality works in mobile and social channels as well with Facebook integration.

Cool Factor: 3
I want It: 3
Revenue Potential: 4

Refundo

Unbanked or underbanked consumers will receive an IRS check and take it to check cashers, where they will face high fees. Refundo allows for tax professionals to open bank accounts for customers on the spot to receive payment by direct deposit. The mobile app allows mobile account origination on Refundo platform, which is built on a prepaid account. Refundo partners with Western Union for cash transactions and offers mobile RDC. Its extensive alerts are helpful for prepaid and younger customers. Refundo is conscientious product, passionately presented.

Cool Factor: 4
I want It: 4
Revenue Potential: 3

Placecast

Placecast teamed up with Vis to demo location-based offers on the Visa Offers redemption platform. The promise is delivering measurable ROI for merchants to market and easily manage offers at the POS. Placecast enables the reloading offers on smartphone for POS redemption. The process seemed to require a lot of unlocking. The presentation began with a disclaimer — the audience smelled fear. Launching in Fall 2013.