Finovate Spring 2011 Live Blog (Part 7)

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, Finovate Sprint 2011 Part 5 and Finovate Sprint 2011 Part 6. 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.

• Expensify – They are showig their receipt-scanning that won them raves at Finovate two years ago. It’s not so much a receipt-scanning as it is a store of pictures of your receipt. You can train expenses to be automaticallly categorized smartly. They used an example of the Tadich Grill, which is one of the few restaurants in San Francisco I’ve been to.
• Openfinance – Tools for financial advisors to share data their clients. For a tool focused around reporting it is very plain and boring looking. One the plus side, they are based in Spain and the female presenter has a sexy accent.
• Adobe – Adobe? At a financial conference? Yes. Adobe is showing off their Customer Experience Management (CEM). The idea here is that they can help financial institutions create better customer experiences. They can do this by pulling a picture from your Facebook (for example) and putting it on a credit card with your name right on it. That’s just one example of 4-5 similar things they are showing off here geared towards banks.
• ChargeSmart – They have a product called Plastic Jungle. The aim is to unlock the value of gift cards. You can actually pay your electricity bill. Plastic Jungle will offer “up to” 92% of the value on your gift card. This is pretty interesting.
• Kony – There tagline is “empowering everywhere.” So Kony is empowering my hats at home, I guess. They showed a screen that looks like the computer coding environment, Eclipse. If you look at it for more than a few minutes, I’m sure your eyes would bleed.

  Okay, I couldn’t resist typing that. It turns out that they actually provide a very useful service for developers of mobile applications. Developers can write code for Kony and create applications iOS, Android, Blackberry, etc. That explains why they were demoing something that looked like Eclipse. I was caught off-guard and not expecting that here. The reason why they are here, is that they have a mobile banking component to their software.

• PayDivvy – It is a social bill paying tool. The classic use case is a group of roommate paying their electric bill. I could have used this in the past. It looks like a real winner.
• edo Interactive – They are showing off their Prewards product. Seems like Bankons and Billshrink where they make offers tied with your financial institution. The offers are similar to Groupon. When you take advantage of an offer you get the credit instantly.