When I’m feeling a bit flip, I tell clients that Celent goes to a lot of conferences so that they don’t have to. Don’t get me wrong: conferences are worthwhile, and you have a lot of serendipitous conversations. But they’re also time away from the office, and, to be honest, not every minute is completely productive. With that in mind, I’ll describe my very-high level takeaways of Finovate Fall 2015, held earlier this week at the New York Hilton. As I listened to each of the 70 7-minute pitches (2 presenters scratched), I tagged them in an unscientific way. Each company received two to eight words describing the space the problem they were solving and how they did it. Here’s the resulting word cloud: Mobile, unsurprisingly, dominated. I was astonished, however, at the prominence of “onboarding,” a term I used to cover a wide variety of solutions pertaining to account opening, from ID verification to assisted form filling. Many talked about eliminating friction, and creating a platform to support a particular service. Security and Fraud were prominent, as was the concept of components, often enabled by APIs. The biggest surprise: only two companies addressed Blockchain technology – perhaps that will change at FinovateSpring. Somewhere around the 60th presentation, I was struck by the variability in presentation skills and solution excellence. Being a consultant, I had to create a 2x2, below. What did we miss because the product or service was presented sub-optimally? Finally, a big thanks to the folks at Finovate – Celent values our partnership with this great event. If you’d like more detail, check out their blog, which describes the best in show winners. What did you like at Finovate?