European Innovators Throw Down the Gauntlet: Where’s the Innovation, Americans?
The financial innovation community in the US is a jaded bunch – NFC? Nobody f-ing cares. PFM? Yawn. Mobile wallet? I’ll just use my credit card. Entrepreneurs in the US keep chipping away at pain points and payments friction, but it can seem like an uphill battle.
When European companies arrive on our shores and present their ideas, they sometimes seem like visitors from the future.
Three companies – mBank from Poland, Numbrs from Switzerland and Pixeliris from France — showed their wares at Finovate Fall in New York this week and threw down the gauntlet to US competitors: “Where’s the innovation?” (Longtime readers may recall this phrase was actually spoken by Kristoffer Lawson of Holvi.)
MBank launched in 2000, but relaunched in June with a new design and new functionality. The mobile-first online bank claims about 4.1 million customers in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Its list of features reads like a wish list for US rivals:
- Video banking with financial advisors
- Merchant- funded rewards in transaction history (a la Cardlytics)
- Event-driven CRM
- Google-like search for transaction histories
- P2P payments via Facebook and SMS
- Shopping and offers within the banking app
- Gamification and education within the banking experience
- Distributed PFM and budgeting/goals features
- Address book of financial contacts for billpay and P2P
- Automatic savings deposits with certain purchases (see SavedPlus)
- Advance loans from paychecks (see Think Finance)
The list goes on. MBank is beautifully designed, with low-key animations throughout the banking experience and attractive visualizations of the user’s finances. It’s a member of BRE Bank, the third largest bank in Poland. Unfortunately, the US is not its next target market – Germany is.
Numbrs is already operating in Germany and Switzerland. The company recently received $3.8 million to bring its mobile banking product to the US. It will launch soon in the UK, as well. Numbrs is an account aggregator along the lines of Mint, but also offers the ability to execute transactions from within the app. This is achieved through integration with the Swiss and German banks with which the company works. Banks in the UK and US might not be so able or willing to connect in the same way.
Many PFM solutions offer insight into the future — MoneyDesktop showed off a nice example. Numbrs has a slightly different take. When you book a plane ticket, for instance, Numbrs adds to your budget the cost of the cab ride to the airport. As your anniversary approaches, Numbrs budgets the cost of dinner and a gift into your upcoming spend.
The company is opening a New York office soon and will begin its US marketing campaign shortly.
Pixeliris is a French payments startup with an intriguing idea called CopSonic. Despairing of NFC as the savior of contactless payment, the company launched a solution using soundwaves. (See, the Clinkle guy wasn’t crazy after all.)
The solution works with an app installed on the phone, without an app, and even with dumbphones. In the latter two cases, the user receives a phone call from the point of sale that plays a certain tone. When the POS hears the tone, it knows the phone is nearby and authorizes the transaction. Working with dumbphones opens the door to potential customers in a huge swath of the non-smartphone-using world, particularly Africa, where phone-based payments are routine.
The technology is shown off in the video below.
The CopSonic SDK is available for download at copsonic.com and the company is actively seeking partners to help develop the solution.
These three products are elegant solutions that reduce friction and make interacting with our banks a pleasure. Do they have a chance in the New World?
