By Tyler Mondres
Financial wellness and lending solutions—often incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into the advice or decisioning process—dominated the first two days of FinovateSpring 2018, encompassing 18 of the 54 demos over the course of the first two days.
Conspicuously absent from the demos were mentions of blockchain, which was referenced by only one or two of the 54 companies.
In a crowded personal financial management field, startups have shifted from solely providing tools to help consumers manage their finances towards focusing on promoting financial wellness. Additionally, a number of digital lending startups demoed unique product features designed to improve the borrower experience. Examples include:
- Kasasa offers borrowers a unique “take-back” function. Borrowers can take any money repaid above the monthly minimum back if they need to in the event of an emergency.
- Status Money provides consumers with peer benchmarks to help users manage spending, income, debts, savings, and investments.
- CUneXus demoed their cpIXpress lending and marketing automation platform that enables lenders to provide customers “perpetual loan approval,” giving consumers ongoing insight into their borrowing options.
- Buckit is a smart personal credit coach that provides personalized advice to consumers on actions they can take to improve their credit.
On Wednesday, Finovate announced the five winners of the best of show award, including:
- Conversation.one for its build-once-deploy-anywhere platform for conversational applications that enable FIs to build, deploy, and enhance chatbots.
- Dynamics, Inc., for its network-approved “connected” payments card with 65k pixel display, organic recharge, and telecommunications chip to facilitate wireless data downloads and customer notifications.
- Kasasa for its take-back loan feature.
- Trusona for its “no passwords” multi-factor identity authentication solution.
- Alpharank for its customer graphs algorithm that leverages anonymized FI transaction data to improve customer relationships and reduce attrition.
Following the two days of demos, Finovate switched gears to discuss a wide range of topics covering current trends and the future of fintech. Topics included the shifting role of the branch, the impact of deposit displacement on checking accounts, advice to startups looking to partner with banks, open banking and much more. All of the demos and a select number of discussions will be available to view on Finovate’s webpage following the end of the conference.
Read more about the best of show winners.
Tyler Mondres is a research specialist in payments and cybersecurity at the American Bankers Association.
The ABA Payments Forum will bring together the best minds in the fintech, banking and regulatory industries to share their expertise on how to stay successful in a today’s fast-paced, technology-focused landscape.
