I spent part of last week at
Finovate Fall in New York (Celent is a proud Finovate partner). I always love the Finovate events - they provide me with a front row seat to examine the latest and greatest in banking technology. I'm primarily interested in companies showcasing emerging technology, and understanding how these technologies and solutions can be harnessed by financial institutions. I'm also really interested in firms that are coming way out of left field - in other words, demonstrating novel approaches to solve consumer challenges.
Here are my favourite 7 minute demos (in no particular order):Shopkeep POS. An iPad based POS system complete with inventory management, mobile payments support, and reporting/analytics tools.
LearnVest. An online tool for creating and managing a financial plan. Offers a fee-based service to connect you with a financial planner with relatively reasonable pricing.
The Currency Cloud. Provide a cross-border payments and forex solution via an API. The API can be used by firms looking to provide cross border payments services.
Innotribe Startup finalist
TransferWise is an example of a firm that is utilizing this API.
Personal Capital. I've written about how
mass market PFM simply doesn't work. Personal Capital is basically a wealth management PFM with a super slick UI (online, mobile, tablet).
Dashlane. I like shopping online, but despise the experience of shopping using my mobile phone. Dashlane presented an elegant solution to streamline the experience. I'm not a great fan of data being stored locally on the device (encrypted).
Most innovative Company:C.K. Mack. An online investment tool that allows users to invest in real estate income properties. I really love that this is different, but I actually dislike it from an investment angle (per my tweet):
Most Overrated Demo:
MoneyDesktop. This PFM player caters to smaller institutions via a range of partners. To be fair, I really like the MoneyDesktop solution and user experience. I especially like that they have synchronized their solution across online, tablet, and mobile. What I didn't like was the "bubble budgets" that everyone at the show was raving about:
I got a lot of flack from others about this comment, but hey, to each his own. There is so much more to PFM and what should be encompassed in next gen PFM and online banking. MoneyDesktop has some of that going on, but the demo focused on these bubbles complete with dueling iPads - highly entertaining, but not what I would call innovative or game changing. If you want to learn more about next generation PFM and online banking, come out to my BAI Retail Delivery session on this topic.
Thanks to Jim, Eric, and team for another great Finovate event.