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(Reblogged from Finovate)
Finovate
Wealth Management Innovation: Finovate Europe Preview
My friends from Finovate are taking the show back to London February 12 & 13, this time extended to two days to fit in 64 innovative companies. Here are a few sneak previews of companies I will be watching relevant in the wealth management, PFM and investing space. (via post show videos, though I will again be there live for Finovate Spring May 14 & 15 in San Francisco)
Financial Simplicity
Learn how Financial Simplicity’s portfolio business management infrastructure enables wealth firms to operate thousands of individually tailored investment portfolios efficiently and compliantly.
It will reveal how portfolio management can blend new world social relevance with operational excellence. Specifically, Financial Simplicity will demonstrate:
- Whole of firm portfolio mandate and compliance monitoring in a single screen
- On-demand portfolio analysis within a socially relevant context
- Investor-tailored portfolio modelling at the click of a button
- Implement pre-compliant portfolio decision-making across a Centralised Investment Proposition in a matter of seconds
IND Group
Story of My Finances is an entirely new approach in digital financial customer service. It takes online banking and PFM to the next level of mass retail financial planning and advice.
Stories are customer-driven financial life processes, such as How to spend less, Prepare for a rainy day, Buy a home or Retirement planning. Stories help end-customers to get financially fit and to have a peace of mind. Stories are the missing link between everyday people and financial products.
We believe that we can improve people’s financial life by licensing our white-label technology to financial institutions.
Investing can be time-consuming. rplan has created a simple, easy-to-use tool to create your own personal investment portfolio from over 2,4000 available investments to find the ones best suited to you.
rplan is for customers who want choice, but who don’t want to become finance specialists just to manage their investments – because there are better things to do in life than researching mutual funds.Innovation type: Investing & asset management, online, PFM
More information
For more information and previews on all of the presenters, visit the Finovate blog.
Wealthfront rolls out yet another tool for the newly Valley rich
Another interesting example of disruption in the wealth management business.
Related articles
Finovate Fall 2012 Best of Show Winners
Another Finovate conference is in the books. The Best of Show winners included MoneyDesktop, one of the companies on my watch list for accelerating the convergence of high tech and high touch, and one that should have been on my list, but had eluded my foresight (Learnvest).
New York welcomed the Finovate road show to town with weather was so perfect that it faded into the background like a perfect picture frame. For the most part, the show graced the perfect frame beautifully, with attractive and engaging interfaces being the rule. So much so that Aite analyst and Snarketing 2.0 blogger Ron Shevlin mused about the attendees being “SedUIced” by interfaces over business impact.
It’s a shame that intermittent WiFi and cell coverage inside the hall occasionally defaced the exhibition with digital graffiti. If I hadn’t known that Javits Convention Center has distanced itself from its early reputation as a patronage mill for the mob, I would have thought that a few of the exhibitors had spurned pre-show shakedowns behind the dumpsters. (“It would be a real shame if that pretty app of yours somehow couldn’t connect to the network right in the middle of your demo…”)
Making the Complex Simple
A wise CFO I once worked with proclaimed that were two kinds of people in the world, those that make the complex simple, and those that make the simple complex.
There weren’t too many in the latter camp, the Finovate team screens and coaches demonstrators well. Still, a few seemed to have slapped technology onto a convoluted process and/or addressed an irrelevant problem; or as someone tweeted– solved problems no one has with technology no one wants. There were (only) a few moments that felt like SharkTank, and I secretly wished for the schadenfreude of a venture capitalist throwing a cold glass of reality on the smoldering embers of a bad idea.
But the majority of the demos addressed relevant problems and simplified the complex with good design, and most appropriately recognized mobile as a significant front in the fintech wars.
All of the Best of Show winners (in alphabetic order):
- Credit Sesame: Mint and LendingTree had a very good looking baby. Credit-centric PFM with recommendations for managing debt.
- Dashlane addressed the sometimes laborious process of filling out multiple fields for e-commerce checkout with a single solution for any vendor on any platform.
- Dynamics showed a payment card with a built-in switch that enables customers to choose multiple payment sources. (Parenthetically, I “invented” this a few years ago in an ideation session. I also “invented” BetaMax when I was nine. And flying suits.)
- eToro had an impressive demo of a pretty product that I happen to categorically reject. Their CopyTrader technology enables stock traders to harness the “wisdom” of the crowds in their own gambling, er, trading. It was a definite crowd favorite, but I have seen the prequels “Internet Stocks” (1999) and “Real Estate” (2007). They were both gripping thrillers with horrible endings.
- LearnVest was a glaring omission from my pre-show list of three firms to watch. The firm and it’s founder and CEO Alexa von Tobel have been getting much well-deserved press, and their latest contribution to the convergence of high-tech and high-touch includes the ability to collaborate with a financial planner.
- MoneyDesktop repeated as a back to back winner. Their patent-pending “bubble budgets” provide a nice graphical representation of budget items and they continue to refine their ecosystem with synching iPad, smartphone and desktop apps.
- PayTap offered a slick and apparently effective solution for paying shared bills via multiple payment sources and social networks. They also pitched it as a way to make it easier when you are asked to help pay someone else’s bill. I’m looking for the blacklist feature on that one…
- ShopKeep POS enables merchants to run a store from an iPad. Another great example of making the complex simple, with a great interface.
All in all, another great show full of smart people and innovative ideas, and another reminder that we are still in the early stages of disruptive technology in financial services.
This is really starting to get good.
Related articles
- FinovateFall 2012 Best of Show Winners (finovate.com)
- Best of Show Locked Up? @MoneyDesktop Demo At #Finovate (bradleyleimer.com)
TechSpeak to English Dictionary
I am excited to spend the next two days peering into the future of FinTech as I watch and hear 60 companies demo their wares at Finovate. This TechSpeak to English Dictionary from Francisco Dao may be helpful for some attendees (and some presenters). Enjoy…
PandoDaily: The TechSpeak to English Dictionary
Related articles
- FinovateFall Kicks Off Wednesday, September 12 (finovate.com)
- The Convergence of High Tech and High Touch in Wealth Management (jpnicols.com)
- FinovateAsia 2012 Demo Companies Revealed — Come See the Future of Asian Fintech Debut in Singapore! (finovate.com)
- Seven Finovate Alum Selected as Innotribe Semi-finalists (finovate.com)
Finovate Spring 2012 Recap
Sorry to take a little while to get this posted, but I had an important Mothers Day post to write.
Last week I attended the fifth annual Finovate financial technology conference in San Francisco. This year’s event was the largest yet, with nearly 1200 entrepreneurs, bankers, investors, analysts and FinTech fans experiencing 63 product demos in 2 days. A few trends I noted:
SoMoLo+Big Data= Deals
As usual, there were lots of innovative companies in the payments space, displaying all kinds of creative ways to move dollars and data from wherever they are to wherever you want them to be. The SoMoLo (social, mobile, local) trend is very evident here, and increasingly being mashed up with Big Data to create specialized Deals– merchant funded rewards, targeted offers, digital coupons, customer loyalty programs, geo-rewards, geo-offers, card-linked offers, offer wallets, etc.
Perhaps one of the most customizable is Giftly, which allows you to gift just about anything from anywhere to anyone– your gift becomes a credit on the recipient’s credit card for a place and amount of your choosing. For instance, you can respond to a friend’s check-in at the local pub with a round on you from across the globe. Pretty cool.
Another very customizable card product is the GlobalVCard, which allows you to issue single or limited use MasterCard numbers for ultra-secure payments. Users can even positively or negatively restrict the types of merchant codes allowed (airlines, restaurants, etc.) and/or limited dollar amounts. Simple and effective user interfaces for iPhone and iPad too. Right now it is only available for CSI MasterCard Corporate Card customers.
Crowdsourcing and White Labeling
There were quite a few white label apps, and as my friend and discerning technologist Bradley Leimer noted on his Twitter feed, it underscores the need for a better user experience in online and mobile banking. Some will leverage their handsome design to help asset hungry banks source new loans, with new social criteria mixed into the underwriting, including OnDeck Capital and Best Of Show winner SoMoLend.
The Gamification of Personal Finance
I have written about my tendency to overuse sports analogies before, but Portfolio Football takes it to a whole new level as personal finance and portfolio management principals are gamified, fantasy football style.
Wall Street Survivor takes a more straight-forward approach, and focuses more on stock trading.
PFM and more for the “Overbanked”
There were lots of great solutions to help empower the “underbanked” (even though analyst and Snarketing 2.0 blogger Ron Shevlin says it’s time to retire that term. As readers of this site know, for better or worse, I have spent most of my career working with the other end of the spectrum. I guess I should call them the “overbanked”.
I am usually somewhat rare at events like this, but I actually heard the term “wealth management” uttered from the stage, not once, but twice. Three of the seven Best Of Show winners involved some form of more sophisticated Personal Financial Management (PFM) tools, including impressive offerings from Personal Capital, MoneyDesktop and iQuantifi.
Also relevant for innovative wealth managers were investor insights from DCisions, a social, communications and collaboration platform manager from Actiance, and a very nice client engagement and management platform “designed by financial advisors for financial advisors” by inStream.
If this trend continues, I won’t be as lonely at future events. That will be good for the wealth management business. I’ve often said that our industry too often makes clients choose between great technology or great people. (Actually, Ron Shevlin would probably approve of the much snarkier way I describe it in person, but I won’t write it here.)
We need to deliver both to be truly excellent.
Congratulations Finovate Spring 2012 Winners!
Congratulations to the Finovate Best of Show winners (in alphabetical order):
All in all a great show, and I enjoyed meeting lots of great people as I explore the intersection of leadership, advice and technology. More of my impressions and my personal favorites coming soon.
Finovate Spring 2012 Preview
This week I will be back in San Francisco attending the Finovate Spring 2012 financial innovation conference.
Finovate is a two-day showcase of the newest financial and banking technology innovations from both established companies and startups. Short company demos of just seven minutes each are presented in back-to-back blasts, and no slides are allowed, so presenters have to focus on the key benefits and what makes their product stand out.
I am looking forward to networking with some old friends and meeting some new ones as I once again take my exploration of leadership, advice and technology on the road.
I will be back here with my notes and observations.
