Experience Matters

Compelling Financial Service Experiences at Finovate 2007

I had the fortune of attending the first Finovate financial services conference in New York City this past Monday. Jim Bruene from the Online Banking Report and NetBanker did a fantastic job in organizing this event. Twenty of the most innovative companies in the space gathered to give us a look into the future of mobile banking, personal financial management tools and social finances.

Key highlights for me came from Billeo, mFoundry and Mint. From my perspective, best-of-show absolutely goes to Mint. More on that below.

Billeo - Pay It Your Way
Billeo is looking to streamline the way consumers purchase goods and pay bills online. Their software promises to save consumers hundreds of hours each year while increasing their on-hand cash and maximizing the benefits of credit card reward programs. Billeo is targeting a group of consumers who prefer to pay the biller direct as opposed to doing it through bank bill pay.

Billeo rocks for these two key reasons: (1) the Billeo toolbar organizes all of your billers for you so that you don’t have to keep track of logins and websites and (2) Billeo lets you choose which method you want to pay the bill with - it could be any one of your checking accounts or credit cards.

Billeo’s big challenge will be adoption. Currently, Billeo’s solution is endorsed by Visa and featured by a number of large banks and their biller directory has nearly 6,000 companies - the largest directory available from any service provider or bank.

mFoundry - Comprehensive Mobile Banking Solutions
Mobile banking is a tough nut to crack. There are three different types of mobile banking - SMS, mobile web and 3rd party apps. Each of them with their own benefits and drawbacks. On top of that, there’s a bunch of different players involved - mobile operators, financial institutions and of course, customers.

With that in mind, mFoundry has focused on developing a 3rd party application that provides a win-win solution for everyone involved. From a customer perspective, their platform looks really promising. mFoundry lets customers add multiple accounts from supported banks, brokerages and credit cards. The mFoundry app lets customers do peer-to-peer payments (think PayPal) as well as contactless payments, where you simply swipe your cellphone over a chip reader to make a payment.

The upside for financial institutions is the ability to create well-branded apps as part of a carrier branded or stand-alone version. The solution is out of the box and easily integrates with common bank technology solutions - so development and integration is relatively painless.

mFoundry really does look like a win-win solution for everyone involved. But they have some intense competition from Firethorn and Clairmail.

Mint - Easy and Intelligent Personal Money Management
Okay - Mint nearly made me drool. Not only is it an easy-to-use tool with a tight value proposition, it’s also a beautiful looking tool. Mint is a money management tool that helps customers save and manage money. It also lets financial service institutions into its ecosystem via a pay-for-performance business model that lets customers easily compare offers from various companies. It’s so, so easy.

At it’s heart, Mint is an account aggregation tool with Quicken-like features that lets users see their net-worth, where money is coming and going and how their savings are being put to use. Their unique twist though is that they help customers save money by aggregating offers in an extremely easy-to-use comparison tool. It shows users exactly how much they will save by choosing one offer over another. Mint’s recommendations are completely unbiased, they simply report the facts of the offer. Although Mint does serve up recommendations based on insights into the user’s finances (e.g., a user with $20,000.00 in her savings account may see offers for accounts with higher yields), it’s up to the user to make the comparisons and final decision.

If Mint is on mission, their goal will be to displace personal finance management tools like Quicken. Quoting one customer, we heard that he was “uninstalling Quicken from my PC tonight”. Keep an eye on these guys and give them a try when you have a moment.

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All-in-all, the first Finovate was a huge success. It brought together a cross-section of folks from banks, technology companies and agencies, like Critical Mass. We saw seven minute demos from twenty of the world’s most innovative financial service solution providers. If there was one theme to single-out, it was that the future of finance is about giving customers complete control over their personal finances in their channel of choice.

Check out Jim Bruene’s NetBanker blog to keep a tab of further developments in the future of finance.

Update - 10/06/07

More coverage of Finovate here, here and here.