Finovate Spring 2011 Live Blog (Part 6)

This is a continuation of my Finovate Sprint 2011 Part 1, Finovate Sprint 2011 Part 2, Finovate Spring 2011 Live Blog (Part 3), Finovate Sprint 2011 Part 4 and Finovate Sprint 2011 Part 5. As with all other parts, these presentations go extremely quickly, so please ignore any typos and grammar issues. I hope to provide a more polished review of the best and worst from Finovate after the event is over.

• Paypal and Discover – Combines Paypal mobile with Discover. Allows people with a mobile phone or an email address (that’s casting a pretty wide net) to accept Discover paymets. For a small business, this is seems like a nice way to set up a merchant account.
• Q2ebanking – It seems like the domain K4ebanking was taken. Like Silver Tail that was mentioned in Finovate Sprint 2011 Part 5 the focus of this company is provide security and fraud detection for banking software. As with Silver Tail, if you don’t run a bank, you probably don’t care.
• Robot Dough – This is a stock screener. SVB of The Digerati Life, chimed in “but it’s fancy.” They do international stock screening too, which is new to me (and maybe the world). In addition, you can backtest a strategy. You can save these strategies and get daily alerts on how they perform.
• Billshrink – Like Free Monee mentioned earlier they are looking to partner with banks and merchants and offer discounts based on past spending. One of the example offers looked like a Groupon. In this case, the person logged into their Chase account and their Toys R Us transaction was highlighted. They click on the highlight and receive an offer for $50 of Toys R Us value for $35. Good stuff!
• eWise – Turns your bank into Paypal. If you are buying from a merchant, you can select your bank, log into your bank’s website and send the payment. This reduces risks for merchants. It seems like more work for people as logging into their bank is usually fairly difficult with all the security questions they require. The company also showed off a mobile application that looked interesting. Allowed for transactions from QR codes is just a few seconds.
• Currensee – Their aim is to bring currency trading to the masses. This would be a new asset class for consumers to access. Since most people don’t know much about currency trading, they allow you to follow the trades of experts. In this way you can piggyback on their performance. You can follow multiple experts and thus diversify your investment. This is something that I will likely keep an eye on.
• Liqpay – This company was based in Ukraine and it showed. They have a “pay to face” money transfer. It seems to be a Facebook application that allows you transfer money to people in Facebook. I give them some credit for putting on a San Francisco Giants hat and trying to blend in with the culture.
• TILE Financial – The Investing Learning Environment (TILE) aims to help 15-25 year olds be financially literate. The idea is to create a profile for each person. TILE has game strategy involved where people can earn badges for reaching milestones. I’ve been a fan of promoting personal finance as a game. Unfortunately, they aren’t offering their services straight to consumers – they are partnering with banks.
• BancVue – They presented a game called Money Island designed to teach children (ages 8-14) financial skills. It’s to money what Where in the World is Carmen Sandeigo is to geography… or at least that it what it seems to me. “Winning” Money Island will give the kids a real world reward. I thought this was pretty exciting.