Live from Finovate Startup – First Demo Session

I’m blogging live from Finovate today. Here’s an update from the first demo session:

• Expensify – “Expense reports that don’t suck…” Gets all information from a credit card import and can produce an IRS tax-compatible receipt. Import from 92% of the US credit cards… Fairly impressive reporting.
• kaChing – KaChing follows fund managers and reports extremely detailed information. The CNBC crowd should love this.
• CircleUp – Their SmartPay product solves a very common problem, collecting information from groups of people. Sounds like it only uses Amazon payments (no Paypal?). They pushed integration with AOL Web Mail – not really that interesting in my opinion.
• The Receivables Exchange – I’m a little hazy on this one… it’s not in my wheelhouse (i.e. not personal finance related). Allows companies to sell receivables, in a P2P marketplace. You bid on invoices that you like and collect the money. The company gets their money early to bring in more business… at least I think that’s how it works.
• Strands – Competitor to Mint and Wesabe… The widget-based interface looks impressive… Good analysis of your income/expenses… Financial alerts could be useful… They integrate a news reader where you can add some blogs… You probably don’t care since they don’t offer Lazy Man and Money despite the fact that I helped them in a focus group. (I’m not bitter, not a small bit…)
• iThryv – Pretty cool banking platform for financial institutions. They are big on the customizable UI (as you’d guess), but also allow good customization of the widgets. Also can target customers based on demographics… a 23-year old woman may get a different interface than a 60-year old man. They built in some reward point system in. It was more impressive than it sounds, but I don’t think you’ll find value in them unless your bank partners with them.
• Lending Club – They talked a lot about the secondary marketplace… we already knew that, so it wasn’t that interesting. They previewed an upcoming feature. They previewed a feature to compare your performance to other lenders.
• Tempo Payments – Tempo claims to offer higher reward debit cards. You can customize your card. Can you say Hello Kitty awesomeness?!?! They claim to offer an 80-90% approval rate. I will look into this a little more, but I wonder if the rewards will compete with my credit card rewards.
• Wesabe – Cool, you can group together two credit cards. Wesabe has started selling Springboard – a whitelabeled version of Wesabe. They’ve signed Georgia’s largest credit union.

That’s it for the first round… I think I like Strands and CircleUp as the most useful new personal finance apps (Wesabe and Lending Club were already in my favorites. Expensify could be great for the business person on the go. Everyone seemed to love iThryv, but it means nothing to me without banking partners.

As Blog Traffic Exchange mentioned via Twitter, the buzzword here seems to be “widgets.” I don’t mind because I love me some widgets.