This year’s flagship Finovate event was held on October 14th at the Crowne Plaza Times Square in New York and, judging by the reactions from both presenters and delegates, was a raging success!

On paper, the schedule looked demanding, with 24 companies having just seven minutes each to make an impression using a live demo of their proposition; powerpoint was banned! Add into the mix two hour-long networking opportunities, plus lunch & coffee breaks, and the event started to look time-poor to say the least. In practice however, the format worked brilliantly, and Finovate was an absolute pleasure to attend.

Sure, improvements could be made; man-in-the-hot-seat Eric Mattson (CEO, Online Financial Innovations) already has plans for a 5-minute Q&A session led by an expert panel after each presentation at the next event, and also noted the impromptu Twitter back-channel that operated throughout the day (although neither of us had a clue what to do about it!) I guess that the informal eve-of-Finovate gathering in a local hostillery might also become a regular feature, although having emailed Eric to suggest such an event, I was particularly disappointed to have missed the inaugural one thanks to an hour-and-a-half queue to clear Immigration at JFK! Homeland Security: I don’t need a poster to tell me your gun-toting guards are the “face of your country”, I need you to have more than just 12 of those faces processing two plane-loads of visitors when our bodyclocks are telling us we should be in bed already. Also disappointing was Crowne Plaza’s decision to close the hotel bar for the duration of the conference. Given the turmoil in the financial markets that was going on outside of our little Manhattan bubble, a good stiff lunchtime drink would’ve been more than welcome for us finance types. Time for the reviews…

The New Quicken Online (Todd Stanley)

A great opening session from Todd Stanley – plenty of energy, humour, and a very polished presentation. Todd grabbed his audience’s attention with the candid disclosure that, in the past, Quicken has been “slow to respond” to customer feedback, and that it was “kinda my Dad’s product”. Quicken’s research has shown that their product needs a complete change of focus, particularly as “70% of Americans now live from paycheck to paycheck, up from 40% just three years ago”, and that there is a real demand for “an anytime, anywhere solution”.

In responding to these challenges, Quicken has focussed on “customer driven innovation”. The result is a “clean simple UI; less is more”, because “desktop software is too intimidating”. Watch that word intimidating; it’s going to crop up again and again at Finovate, almost as much as “vertical”!

I really like Quicken’s change of focus; this feels like an app I could use. The alerting on account balances and risk of overdraft are well executed and go a long way to solving the biggest problem Quicken’s researchers found that users had with their finances today: “managing cash in a checking account between now and the next payday.” Funnily enough, Matt & I had identified this same problem during a brainstorming session a month or so ago! This focus on immediate finance is at “the heart of the new Quicken”. There is a spending money “outlook” view, plus the ability to filter views by the time between paycheck cycles. Finally, Quicken is introducing a mobile component which allows users to instruct Quicken to “send me a daily status”

Quicken Online became a free service the day before Finovate 08, and the new version will launch in the USA on October 30th. Whether the rest of the world will ever see it (yes, Quicken, there are people who live outside of North America) will largely depend on whether Quicken’s worldwide affiliates decide to pull their fingers out (so that’ll be a no, then).

Fincision rating: 7/10 (1 point deducted for ignoring the rest of the world; we’re a global village now, didn’tcha know?)

WeSeed (Steve Simoncic)

WeSeed is for people who have “never invested in the stock market”, “don’t get the language”, and “find it too intimidating” (there’s the “i” word again); its the “stock market for the rest of us”. WeSeed is also “completely safe” as it uses “fake stock; fake money”, but let’s users “get their hands dirty” anyway!

Users are encouraged to start by “investing in what you know”, by choosing from an array of specially created micro-markets, such as fashion, kids, sports and tech. They can also run a proprietary keyword search which returns relevant stocks “Facebook style”, and then construct a virtual brokerage account known as “PortfolioYOU”. There’s a feature which shows the “Companies you own” plus a user’s personal compatibility rating (“similar to match.com” – that’s another phrase that’ll crop up a few times in this post) to particular stocks. Inevitably, there’s also a social element to WeSeed, with users able make connections with investors interested in the same micro-markets, tap into stock views from other users, and “follow Weseeders you think are smart.”

But for me, WeSeed is a bit of a conundrum. It’s a nice looking execution of a fairly unoriginal core idea (think fantasy portfolios done web 2.0), but I can’t get past the feeling that it’s a one-trick pony. Is it just an educational tool/ game with a slightly different take on categorising stock, or can it really help make people better at investing? How do users move from managing virtual to real portfolios, and what is WeSeed’s role once that happens?

The presenter’s referencing of match.com and Facebook didn’t help convince me that WeSeed has enough originality and appeal to survive, particularly when this “stock market for the rest of us” is launching just about the time the rest of us appear to be dumping stock like crazy. Now if WeSeed has a way of educating unsophisticated investors not to sell at the bottom of the market, it might be a lot more relevant in today’s climate…

WeSeed is signing up beta testers right now, if you want to see what it’s all about. Thanks for the t-shirt, guys…  … but (sorry) I think it might last longer than you will, although I hope you get the chance to tell me how wrong I was next April in San Francisco!

PS. I REALLY don’t like your homepage, especially with that youtube vid that starts up without my permission; very poor usability, people…

Fincision rating: 6/10

Wesabe (Gabe Griego)

Gabe set himself a mountain to climb by opening up with the assertion that Wesabe was the “perfect blend of community and finance”. Did he peak too soon? LOL   Well, at the time of the presentation, I genuinely had a good feeling about Wesabe, but now I’ve come to write about it, I’m starting to think that there wasn’t much substance once you get past the highly polished marketing messages. Sure, being able to fire an expense into Wesabe via twitter is a neat solution to the bain of all personal finance managers – near-time data input – but it isn’t a game-changer in the same way that rival Mint is going about things. In fact, there’s nothing original in the other core ideas Gabe presented either: allowing users to enter their own tags for categories of spending, customising their home pages a la igoogle, or comparing themselves to other “Wesabeans”, and I certainly don’t think that the grand claim to be “taking the API concept to everybody” is borne out by building a shared gallery of user-designed and community-rated graphs!

So, is this all that Wesabe has up its sleeve to “bring community data and personal data to life”? Perhaps not, as Gabe admitted that Wesabe was “not as far along as we’d like this (to be) – still fresh out of the gate.” There were seeds of good but still unoriginal ideas, such as a community-powered merchant rating system, but Wesabe needs to try a lot harder if it wants to live up to its own hype. That hype is a big part of the problem for me. Telling people that “money is one of those things that is hard to talk about” sounded reasonable in the context of Gabe’s presentation, but when you leave the conference hall and find that the whole world appears to be talking about nothing else, you start to see through the marketing messages to a fairly uninspiring set of product enhancements.

Fincision rating: 5/10

ZoneAlarm Forcefield (John Gable)

My initial reaction to seeing this session appear on the agenda was to wonder why it was allowed in, so I was pleasantly surprised by John’s presentation. His opening pitch, that “cyber criminals are making more money out of online than drugs” by “hooking into the web browser” was pretty compelling, and his observation that most phishing software “relies on a list” was a bit scary!

His product, Forcefield, wraps your browser in a big, warm and fluffy security blanket that keeps malware from grabbing your personal data, and uses heuristics to identify potential threats; in effect, it allows users to “run everything in a virtual sandbox.” It even protects in the instance of a “dirty” PC that’s already been unwittingly infected by a prior install of malware. And the relevance to the Finovate audience? Seeing as many of the products on show relied on varying degrees of user data from zip code to full bank login details, VERY!

At the moment, Forcefield is only available as a local install but, in the network event afterwards, John told me that Checkpoint was working hard on an “on-demand solution”; definitely one to watch…

Fincision rating: 7/10

Sybase 365 (Cameron Franks)

I’m looking at my notes and thinking… …do I care! Sybase 365 is a mobile banking solution. Yawn. Sorry, its an “innovative new banking platform, turnkey solution” with “back office tools and operational management” from a company that owns and manages its own messaging network. And it interprets natural language. But I still don’t care. And I was very distracted by the really, REALLY poor demo which involved a blameless young lady attempting to do stuff on an iPhone. Unfortunately, the audience couldn’t see what was happening as, every time she needed to type in something, she picked up said phone and removed it from the projector’s field of view! It’s probably a neat product, and I’m being a bit harsh, but I just don’t care…

Fincision rating: 5/10 (neutral)

FiLife (Dave Kansas)

FiLife is the “website designed to find the product (you) need”. OK, its basically a directory site (albeit with 10,000 products from 1700 companies loaded at start-up) with comparison features to the fore, but I liked it nonetheless – there’s obviously a lot of thought gone into this product. FiLife only covers credit cards at the moment, but plans to cover the “entire personal finance landscape” eventually.

Back to the cards then… …their proprietary algorithm, which calculates a value to the user of owning a credit card (by sifting through your spending patterns to see if you really would get a cashback or other advertised incentive) is a clever feature which really did make the “simple inputs, rich outputs” claim come to life. The search input area itself was a bit of a Kayak rip-off, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of, however “The Stacker”, an animated, stickman-based visualisation of “where you stand against the nation” is original and (briefly) entertaining! And I loved the bubble search results representation, guys, even if it is a usability nightmare when there are a lot of results! LOL

If (and its a big “if”) FiLife can keep up the momentum by adding more innovative features, whilst also expanding their product coverage, they could be onto a real winner; another one to watch (and you have some very interested people in London, Dave!)

Fincision rating: 8/10

Vidoop (Mitchell Savage)

Vidoop has been “working for the last three years to solve a problem”, and that problem is the trade-off between usability & security. Vidoop makes the job of logging on to secure platforms easier for users and harder for hackers, and offers three different login options: verification by phone, image shield, and sms activation. Of the three, verification by phone was the coolest demo, particularly when the pc browser page changed when the user clicked a keypad value on a mobile phone. Image shield, which plays on the “recognition” (rather than recall) ability of a user, featured a set of click-able images as pass keys but was particularly interesting to me as the images could be sponsored in order to generate a revenue stream! SMS activation code was a plain ol’ boring 2 factor authentification by phone.

Vidoop is a bit like Forcefield in that, whilst it isn’t a pure finance application, it’s very relevant to the space, and delivers extremely well on it’s proposition. So much so that Charles Schwab are using it! I’m looking forward to catching up with Mitchell in London soon to find out more about his product, and whether or not he’s secured his international patents…

Fincision rating: 7/10 (but could be an 8 after next week)

BoulevardR (Matt Iverson)

I have to admit that BoulevardR was one of the companies I was especially here to check out; their personal finance management/advice app is of particular interest to me at the moment… …so, I was a little bit worried that we appeared to be 2 minutes into the 7, and Matt hadn’t said one word. Silence! He was waiting for his site to load. I guess presenting isn’t Matt’s strong point…

When he did eventually get going, I just got a bit confused about where he was pitching his product. Here’s me thinking this was a direct to consumer play, but no, my “members are small business owners”. Uh? Then there was also something about a co-development with Advanta (more below), but Matt had lost me at this point!

There were elements of the demo I liked, particularly the visual goal-setting (drag ‘n’ drop goals onto a timeline), but overall I just felt it was all a bit too clunky. OK, the flex interface was slick (once it had loaded), but I didn’t quite grasp how BoulevardR was using zip codes to “get data”, and I must admit to a sly smile on hearing the collective groan from the audience when Matt said “and at this point we run 1000 monte carlo simulations…”

BoulevardR’s aim of providing “comprehensive planning in a simple way” is noble, and the fact that they are working with Certified Financial Planners (CFPs) to develop their advice engine, even to the point of allowing users to simulate the monetary impact of future life events, is the right way to go. But, the execution is lacking, and I’m not the only one to have noticed; seems BoulevardR has a little bit of baggage to deal with, too…

Now, that Advanta tie-up… … I asked what this was all about during the networking session. It boils down to this: users can get a slimmed-down financial report (“Starter Roadmap”) for free, but must pay $79 for the full version, OR they can get the full version for free if they sign up to an Advanta credit card. Oh dear…  … I wonder how their CFPs feel about encouraging users to get into debt in order to access a financial recommendation for free! LMAO

Fincision rating: 4/10 (2 points deducted for the inappropriate affiliate deal; that’s just lame, guys)

Inner8 (Doug Doyle)

Look out! Here comes another match.com reference: “We’re match.com for investors”. Privately-funded Inner8 finds users “investments that are soulmates” (as opposed to the soul-destroying ones everyone woke up to on the morning of the gig!)

How does this work? Inner8 “matches four different ways”: people to people, stocks to stocks, market conditions to stocks, and finally people to stocks. There are around 45 matching criteria involved, and “fuzzy logic” is employed to detect stocks that are “very likely to move with a chosen sector”.

So, Inner8 behaves like a socially-networked dating site, but helps you identify which stocks are bull or bear-friendly, and has, on first sight, a simple way of dealing with correlation. Wrong! Its actually quite a complex and extremely powerful way of handling “hidden correlations”, if not a little un-intuitive at times (there’s the potential for some weird, but stil technically correct, results). Given the potential complexity of the subject, Inner8 have done a superb job in dumbing down (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense) investment selection by borrowing heavily from another, more familiar, genre. I really like that idea and the execution, especially when  you compare it to this overly-complex potential competitor!

As with Weseed, Inner8’s challenge will be in monetising their proposition and retaining user interest once real investments have been made. However, I’ve got a good feeling about Inner8…

Fincision rating: 8/10

Ratesurfer (Mitch Calderwood)

Ratesurfer is a desktop java-based “total credit card management” solution, which promises that “it’s gonna save whoever uses it money”. I almost switched off at this point, but I’m glad I didn’t…

The first little surprise came with the revelation that this app doesn’t use a 3rd party aggregator (such as the ubiquitous Yodlee), but instead uses a proprietary, desktop-based aggregation engine to collect credit card data. The second surprise was the demonstration of a “real-time balance transfer” between cards. Wow! This really does look clever. In fact, it’s almost too clever; I just can’t believe you can physically do that (neither did the people sat around me!)

Add in the ability to set alerts across all cards, including notifications of APR changes, and Ratesurfer does become worthy of a lot more investigation, even if it’s just to see whether that balance transfer thing isn’t just vapourware! Oh, and it looks sexy too…

Mitch says “you always get the credit you deserve”; time will tell, sir, but I’m on your side…

Fincision rating: 7/10

MyMoney (Brian Bellhorn)

MyMoney is a Facebook app (from FiServ’s Galaxy division; uh?) that provides “one-click access to all accounts” to “an audience with financial clout”. Whilst I get the fact that MyMoney is “practical, useful and satisifies a goal” to a certain extent, I’m struggling!

Don’t get me wrong, targeting Gen X & Y is absolutely the right way to go; these are the people disenfranchised by warm-body financial advisers who are chasing the HNW market instead (nothing wrong with that either!) But, c’mon, FACEBOOK? Absolutely the last place I’d go to manage my finances! Sure, its a big and expanding audience (1200 users added during the 7 minute Fiserv presentation), and Brian went through the web 2.0 finance checklist like a knife through butter (find new customers, enrol, cross-promote, secure one-click access, viral marketing), but why tie a decent product to one (actually, ANY) social network?

Personally, I don’t see social networking in its present guise lasting much longer; we’re over the hump, and there are brighter, shinier things out there already. So, sorry, I just don’t get it: its a neat product, but I don’t buy why it has to sit on THAT platform; maybe I’m too old to understand!

In an effort to appear more hip, I thought I’d catch up with the Fiserv guys to see if they could point me in the right direction, particularly as my UK-based clients might well be interested…

…so I tried to get a conversation going at the networking event, but was met with a rather terse response from their sales guy, plus an unexpected view of his considerable back. Guess what, big fellah, your attitude wins you the “Rudest Rep in Show” award, and a big raspberry from me!

Fincision rating: 2/10 mostly for the afters served up by the up-himself sales jock

Loanio (Michael Solomon)

Prior to Finovate, there was quite a bit of hype surrounding Loanio, a new peer-to-peer lending site. This is a VERY fluid marketplace, with recent comings & goings grabbing headlines along with reports of regulatory difficulties for some other players so, on the face of it, Loanio’s launch is either brave, foolhardy or inspired!

This is a sexy-looking web 2.0 site that went live at the beginning of October and “targets two distinct audiences – borrowers & lenders”. So far, so good, but I’m afraid my eyes glazed over when we got to “an exciting and innovative place for people looking for credit and investment opportunities!”

For a start, I just couldn’t get my head around the jointly-liable co-borrower thing. Enhancing the chances of success for an applicant with no or poor credit history by allowing people to share the liability for a slice of the action is innovative but, given recent events in the US lending space, is this wise?! Even if the Platinum service goes the extra mile in vetting applicants, I still get an uneasy feeling about all of this; or am I being unduly sensitive?

Ultimately, for all the hype, I was just a little bit bored by this presentation. Was this down to the subject matter? I though it might have been until I re-read my notes on Lending Club…

Fincision rating: 6/10

Time for a break. Part 2 will follow in a few days time…

Related posts:

1. Looking back at Finovate Start-up 09
2. Live from Finovate Startup 2009
3. IFP Conference 2008 Review