Six More Startups Take Flight at Money2020
Day 2 of LaunchPad360, Money2020’s Finovate-like event-within-the-event featuring startups and new fintech ventures, showcased six more companies Wednesday. Matt Harris of Bain Capital Ventures again MCed, and even did a bit of standup that was lost on the sober and serious audience hungry only for innovation.
Read about the first day’s batch of startups here. On to the Wednesday crop:
Pangea is a money-transfer company with a social mission: empowering the 2.5 billion underbanked consumers around the globe. Working on a prepaid platform, Pangea looks to extend banking services to everyone, including customers with only feature phones and access to a retailer. Global fees average 9.3% — Pangea’s is lower. Remittance revenue is shared throughout the value chain. Its goals are vast, including supporting global entrepreneurship.
PushPoint presented its location-based mobile advertising solutions for small businesses alongside Capital One Financial Corp. — not a bad partner. The companies showed off the technology to push ads to those within a certain geofence near the store — an annoyance of the future we will all learn to live with — and to push content to a user’s app once they are in the store. Hyper-local advertising, especially is targeted, is obviously powerful stuff. This demo featured role-playing and a few quick-change costumes, making it the most Finovate-like of the LaunchPad360 demos.
Remitly is a person-to-person money movement site with a focused mission: help customers send money to the Philippines. With partnerships at most of that nation’s major banks and many of its retailers, Remitly makes it simple and affordable for Filipinos in the US to send money back home. (Filipinos overseas are notorious for remitting money back home.) Moving money across international lines is slow, expensive and inconvenient, and it’s great to see several startups address this. The Philippines is a big remittance market, but can Remitly scale beyond it?
Simplee solves a large problem: the confusing nature of healthcare payments. Simplee is both a consumer app and an app for healthcare providers, the company says. It helps consumers predict costs of procedures and set up payment plans for larger bills. The system is hardly less confusing for doctors, and Simplee aims to cut through the clutter and help doctors pay attention to patients rather than billing codes. The company announced Simplee Wallet, which was described as being “like Mint.com.”
Fastacash is (yet) another P2P money transfer service. The service creates a link that that can be sent across social networks and can be clicked to access the funds. Other things can be sent via the link as well, such as coupons, airtime minutes, and multimedia messages. Fees were said to be very small. The company has traction in Kenya, home of M-PESA.
Zumigo is an authentication service that uses mobile phone networks to identify customers. Network-based authentication is more accurate than device-based methods, which can be “spoofed” by fraudsters. Zumigo is able to locate both smartphones and dumbphones, giving it wide potential application in the developing world to authenticate, such as SMS-based transactions. Zumigo is a startup that is being tapped by other startups: PushPoint (see above) is a user of Zumigo’s services.
Winner of Day 2: Simplee
