Mobile onboarding and authentication continue to be major preoccupations of the financial services community, and for good reason.
This was made abundantly clear on the second day of Finovate yesterday in New York as company after company showed solutions solving for these two problems, much as they did the day before. A few payments companies reared their heads yesterday, but the identity problem behind who is making a payment appears to be a much more pressing concern — and focus for fintech startups.
Bitcoin and the blockchain and wearables, which have grabbed headlines over the past year, were barely in evidence at Finovate, which offers a good sampling of the current crop of fintech startups. Was this a sign of fintech growing stale and backing down from new ideas, or a return to solid fundamentals?
Here is a brief review of the companies that presented yesterday. Read our Day 1 account here.
- BizFi is a small business loan platform, and BizFi is itself a lender — or buyer of future revenue — on the platform.
- SaleMove showed off Omnicall, an omnichannel concierge service for digital banking.
- Sliced Investing gives access to hedge fund investments to everyday investors.
- New Kapitall Holdings gamifies investing for millennials: “Get tickets, enter raffle, win money.”
- Big Data Scoring provides scorecards using online data to supplement lenders’ own scoring.
- Bleu payments are network and process-agnostic. The company demoed a real-live beacon and proprietary POS device on stage (and in the crowd). Payments were not much in evidence at Finovate this year.
- Dyme offers text-based savings for millennials. For example, Dyme users text “Save 10” to put $10 in a savings account. This contrasts with automatic savings/investment with Digit and Acorns.
- D3 Banking expanded its digital banking platform to include new tools and analytics for banks to offer small business customers.
- Eco Mail is a digital post office to cut down on paper and mailing costs for enterprises. Customers can pay e-bills sent by businesses electronically too.
- FinanTeq showed off SuperWallet, which integrates other services, such as Uber and commerce, into the mobile banking app. based in Poland, the company is making a move for the U.S. market soon.
- Fiserv showed off cardfree cash — cardless ATM withdrawals — and a Finovate rarity, a smartwatch app!
- GoRMS‘s YAP platform highlights rewards and emphasizes the power of referrals and social connections.
- Encap Security performed a neat trick — demoing nearly invisible security and authentication — all the while pointing out that intrusive security is harmful to the user experience.
- Lexmark, which purchased Kofax in March, showed off yet another onboarding application using voice, OCR, and biometrics to eliminate keystrokes.
- LiquidLandscape demoed a data visualization dashboard that includes communication tools for traders.
- Novabase showed off its Wizzio intelligent portfolio management tool smart machine for financial advisors powered by IBM Watson. Wizzio is for financial advisory professionals, but myWizzio for consumers is launching soon.
- Tranwall gives customers additional card controls that can be embedded in apps and legacy systems for enterprise use.
- LiftForward turns products into services, or subscriptions. The company demoed subscription plans for buying Windows tablets and mentioned small business loans. It has more than $250 million in capital, but seems more like a retailer than a fintech company.
- ThetaRay detects anomalous activity in blocks of unstructured data and provides an actionable fraud detection dashboard.
Quisk, formerly MOBIbucks, calls itself a bank-led mobile payment app for digitizing cash. It appears to walk much of the same ground as PayNearMe, and even uses PayNearMe for its brick-and-mortar payments network. - Hedgeable is a private banking and investing platform for millennials. The robo advisory helps millennials manage their investments without having to, you know, like, talk to anyone.
- PaySwag is a collections app that rewards customers for paying back their loans. Gamification, education and rewards are all great ideas for collections technology. The company for now is focusing on auto loan collections.
- Ethoca announced itself as an anti-fraud network for banks and merchants to detect card fraud early on.
- Hypori presented with Visa on enterprise mobility, providing cloud-based apps in a secure environment on mobile devices.
- Socure‘s authentication product Perceive uses social pictures to verify identity. The software asks, Given the user’s identity and device, is this the correct face?
- Ldger‘s platform allows users to securitize marketplace loans. Investors can pool loans with other investors, connected by Ldger, and build securities — cool. The more money that pours into marketplace lending, the greater the marketplace lending volume.
- RedCloud addresses the $440 billion forex market, where transactions cost 10% of the total sent on average. The service promises realtime payments with no settlement delay.
- Voitrax links together calls on trades, tagging and transcribing calls to spot potential fraudulent transactions. The listening technology seemed accurate and impressive, beyond what the market offers today, even by Nuance, the leader in this space.
- Ephesoft Universe’s data mining gives insight into how investments affect users’ portfolio. The insights come from millions of pages of unstructured data such as mortgage docs. Use cases could go far beyond real estate.
- Dynamics, Inc. continues to use its generous funding and MasterCard partnership to push the boundaries of the card from factor. Kind of a Finovate classic at this point.
- ArcBit, the conference’s final presenter, was the first to mention bitcoins. It showed off a bitcoin-based P2P payments app with a clever recovery function — lost wallets were a notorious problem in the cryptocurrency’s early days.
Voitrax, Ldger, Dyme, and PaySwag won us over today — but all the presenters impressed us, and we salute their passion, energy and dedication to moving the industry forward. Best of luck to all of them, and thank you to Finovate for providing a venue to see entrepreneurs in action.