Five Startups Win Innotribe 2014 New York

NEW YORK – Five early-stage companies won the approval of attendees at the Innotribe Startup Challenge in New York that took place June 5: Standard Treasury, Epiphyte, LendingRobot, Wallaby and Juntos Finanzas.

These five companies will travel to Boston in September for Sibos, where an overall winner will be chosen. Last year’s winner was KlickEx.

Innotribe, SWIFT’s startup initiative, is in a transition year with the departure of its founders. Under the direction of Fabian Vandenreydt, who also heads up SWIFT’s global securities and treasury markets business, Innotribe has grown to include a pool of nearly 300 startups. These startups are narrowed down to fifteen that will compete for the final prize at Sibos 2014. Five winners were chosen at events in Singapore, London, and New York.

Here are the five winners of Innotribe New York.

Standard Treasury is a full-service API platform for banks. While it sounds pretty straightforward, banks are actually woefully underprepared to develop in the complex world of APIs. Standard Treasury works with building, maintaining, and supporting white-labled developer platforms for banks across the world, and takes care of almost everything on the developer side so banks can just focus on improving and fine-tuning these apps.

Epiphyte is enterprise software that aims to bridge the gap between current bank and financial institutions and crypto finance. Using Epiphyte, banks will be able to integrate their existing services and traditional protocols like SWIFT with cryptocurrency protocols. Essentially, the goals is to extend the benefits of cryptocurrency transactions — they’re instantaneous, efficient, and transparent — and bring those benefits to traditional banking. Epiphyte is “agnostic” as Epiphyte CEO Edan Yago told Bank Innovation, so it even works with competitors like Ripple.

LendingRobot uses analytic tools to offer customers the best loan possible at an efficient and speedy rate. Essentially, LendingRobot acts as an intermediary and levels the playing field for the individual investor, helping them compete with hedge funds and other financial institutions with access to better technology.

Wallaby has been around for awhile and recommends certain cards that customers should use with certain merchants, depending on loyalty points, cash back rewards, and other programs. The app has been written about in CNN Money and Forbes and Wallaby is planning on introducing the Wallaby Card, a Coin-like card that stores all of your credit cards and uses the card that offers the most rewards. The card is projected to come out in 2014, with an EMV version in development and tentatively scheduled for 2015.

Juntos Finanzas is an automated, SMS-based, customer service program that helps new bank customers get acclimatized with their brand new accounts. The service is mainly available in Latin America, and CEO and co-founder Ben Knelman said that the company was looking to expand into East Africa as well. The company boosted user activity in their initial three-month trial by 35%, which led to a 50% increase in the average bank account balance for new accounts.

There were a number of other startups in competition as well:

Beyonic aggregates mobile money networks to make it easier to facilitate payments in emerging markets like Africa.

Bison crawls public data on private companies for private equity funds and venture capitalists so these investors can easily and efficiently find the analytics they need.

CUneXus is analytics company that simplifies the loan approval process by providing users with perpetual loan approval status so that they can just focus on making purchases.

Digital Retail Apps is the parent company of Self-Pay, an in-aisle mobile self-checkout. Using beacons and new technology, users are able to log into the Self-Pay app and scan and purchase their items, with a digital verification being sent to the customer and merchant.

Nerture aims to help merchants and banks share SKU-level data about customers to build a 360-degree shopper profile.

SnapSwap uses Ripple Protocol to facilitate transactions over a variety of currencies, including virtual currencies.

TrustingSocial aims to add value to traditional FICO credit scores by offering real-time credit scores based on social data from networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Intoo is a intermediary service that is trying to revamp the small business loan market in Brazil. Intoo offers small businesses competitive loans with low interest rates from banks, while collecting data on small businesses to gauge their risk.

Novelty Labs‘ HolyTransaction app is essentially a multicurrency wallet so it can facilitate seamless and efficient transactions between users who own virtual currencies.

Socure is a innovative new service that looks at social profiles to verify a user’s identity. For instance, if a user tries to create a bank account, Socure will try to verify a user’s information using their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media profiles.