Finovate: eBill

Small business bill payment electronically. 250M in payments processed last year.

Control bill payments through email. Vendors send bills to you directly = no paper

Everything is synched with quickbooks, so you don't have to reenter a bunch of data.

I get to track my payments, see cleared checks/cheques and overall save time and effort around bill approvals and payment. You can apply credits from your vendors. Reviews and approvals work nice and cleanly. Of course, throw in the iPhone/iPad words because I have to always do this stuff when I'm on the road.

LinkedIn approach to inviting vendors to join you for payment. The vendors maintain their bank info in the system, less hassle for you.No merchant fees for them.

Invoices impiorted from quickbooks allow you to send quick reminders with a single click.

Payments coming to you go straight into your bank account. Integrating accounting system. Efficiency for small business

A post from the Improving It blog

Finovate: erollover

erollover: take control of your retirement. The focus on customer acquisition than customer education has killed the value to many people.

These guys deliver unbias content to retirement planning.

4 Themes

1. Manage your resources - free and unbiased tools across your funds
2. Education - more rich content than you can find anywhere. Content partnerships (eg bankrate) and other sources provide this
3. Sharing - more than blogging. How do you become trusted in the finserv space? Build a social media community. Honest reviews, a la Yelp for finserv
4. Missed the last one. Sorry....

Looks interesting enough

A post from the Improving It blog

Finovate: oFlows

oFlows takes the paper out of the account opening tool for any FI.

A nice demo, showing how they can remove many of the dull parts of account opening: putting a form online that actually does something useful, checks credit and identity, gather account information for funding, and offers most powerfully a clever engine for cross selling. There are electronic communication consents. And there are electronic signatures on your app forms.

Finally your client can upload his identification documents. I like the idea. I worry about some of the AML issues.

There is a nice background view of the client - a client centric approach to account opening! I love you guys! Cross sell capabilities. Remove paper from the process. Evertything goes into your systems of record.

Save money on the front end, backend and avoid customers dropping out. Very nice message. Clear, targeted presentation to the banks.

A post from the Improving It blog

Finovate: Visa

Highly scripted presentation from Visa. RightClick as webapp and plugin. You get the ability to prepare an online wishlist for the stuff you want to buy from across the web. You can then quickly and securely populate and pay for these items.

Rightclick grabs info from merchants' sites. But really, do we need so many different terms Visa? Rightclick, Wishspace, Clusters? We are going to have to learn your lingo to use your product. Brand the product, sure, but then speak common English for the rest of what you do.

So I'm in my Wishspace, I've bookmarked a camera I want to buy, then I click it and jump back to the store. Delicious, have you thought about bookmarking products. Wow, innovative!! (sarcasm alert).

And then it can populate payment info back on the real merchant's site. And I can pay with Mastercard.

I don't get the value to me, or how it encourages vendors to work with them on it.

A post from the Improving It blog

Finovate: WorkLight

The challenges of mobiles: the lockin of having to develop apps for every mobile is complex. How do you keep costs under control with the Android, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry etc.

These guys can help you develop a secure app once and distribute it across many types of devices. Not really sure how that is going to get past the Apple new licensing terms for iPhone and iPad which limits development tools that don't run Objective C.

Unfortunately you don't have the nice Apple look to iPhone apps, despite what the presenter is claiming.

Blackberry is not there yet.

I like being able to break the boundaries of different devices, though I'm not sure if they can do it.

Here we are going, with another downloadable mobile banking app for your PC. We need these (I talked about this lots) though I'm not sure yet if we are really ready for consumers to be downloading without thinking. At least Apple controls their environment so heavily.

A post from the Improving It blog

Finovate: Wikinvest

Now you can agregate the data from all your brokers (E*Trade, Ameritrade, etc)

If you were caught out by the craziness on the markets last week, at least you could have tracked better how all of your investments were plummeting.

You import your data into their service and benchmark your financial adviser. How much are you paying your brokerage in fees. I assume that they are building the benchmarks themselves based on all their users.

The aim is to give you a view across your whole portfolio.

Hurricane: a new thing coming up soon. For the highly active trader, live data, earnings reports etc all come in as soon as they are published. Within seconds you get the important news before the financial reports have even looked at it.

A post from the Improving It blog

Finovate: Fiserv

Fiserve is looking at how to make consumer online banking and personal financial management more mobile friendly. Not really sure how they are different from my Bank of America online site yet, although I'm sure there is plenty of traction from having a cool Apple iPad app.

We have a sprinkling of person to person payments through zashpay, some ebills and a look at financial goals and budgets.

The message: a downloading an application is becoming common sense. The iPad and iPhone has helped open up the market to downloadable apps again. People want the unique experience that comes from that. But really, do we want to encourage people to start downloading random apps onto their PCs?

Slick demo/ Not sure who the audience was.

A post from the Improving It blog

Finovate: MoneyAisle

Staring at the home page of the website. It looks pretty enough. Though where is the demo? The challenges for customers and FIs have been talked through. The clever stuff is something about reverse auctions when customers are getting credit.

The simplicity of the form belies the complexity of the engine under the covers. Its going to be hard to convince customers that they are not just getting a bunch of adverts. Really they claim that the credit unions and banks are actively bidding for your business behind the scenes

Acquisition costs for banks is low: they only pay when they win the business

The consumer gets a better deal. I wonder if it works? Maybe the next time I go and buy a car I'll try it!

A post from the Improving It blog

I'm here at Finovate Spring 2010. All my company allegiances are dropped for the day (trust me, I'm good at suddenly becoming independent, as my clients routinely demand it of me). I'm here to watch some companies demo their finest products to a hopefully receptive audience. I'm on the side of the presenter, as I know how hard (and incredibly stressful) it can be to pull off a great demo. It demands a show with a well rehearsed script, a great story, and a well behaved cast. Unfortunately, software demos can be like working with children and animals - ready to act up at the worst moment. So, good luck presenters, good luck companies, and if I sound a little bit down on your demo, its only because I'm jetlagged, coming out of my own big presentation before jumping on a plane out to San Fran. So please impress me and your audience, and everybody will be happy.

Phil Ayres - Blogging live from FinovateSpring 2010

Follow my tweets at: http://twitter.com/consected

A post from the Improving It blog

Show me the best you've got

I appear to be in training for a marathon blogging session at Finovate next Tuesday in San Francisco. My training is unusual in its form: avoid doing anything related to the event for at least two weeks before the big day. Why? Because to blog for eight hours straight is going to deserve focus and a clean plate. It was time to do some real work for a while so I'm not distracted at the event by all the other stuff I feel I should be doing.

Despite the numerous calls and pitches from the PR firms I have chosen to ignore, I'm planning to use Finovate for what it claims it does best: I am going to see fast-paced demonstrations delivered by the best and brightest financial services focused technology companies, and on the basis of the demo alone assess what's going to be the next big thing in the finserv technology space. Or to use Finovate's own words:

With Finovate's signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides allowed) from handpicked companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of unique value into a single day.

How can a short demo, with no Powerpoint be the best way to understand a new, innovative product? In short, it is not. And at the same time, it proves how easy it will be for prospective customers to understand the value and the message related to new technology products.

Technologist talk in their local industry babble. Customer's speak their own in-house babble. Somewhere in the middle the only understandable discussion comes from the way a set of English words haven't been abused for their own limited purposes. If a company at Finovate can show their product in a way that makes sense to me, while I'm only half paying attention and blogging, the demo is actually interesting to watch, the product sounds valuable and the presenter even makes me laugh, then that is a signal of potential success. Those companies and PR firms should give me a call again after the event so I can write a little more about what they do.

To everybody that I currently know nothing about, Tuesday is your chance to shine. Do well, and there is a good chance that you will sell well to customers in every subsequent sales demo you do. Bore the 'whatever' out of me and you should be probably going to the accountancy conference up the street where your brand of fast-paced, low-risk 'value' will be more appreciated.

To everybody presenting: good luck! I look forward to blogging about your demos live from the event, and writing more about the best of you soon after.

A post from the Improving It blog