Finovate arrived in New York on a beautiful fall day and brought with it a host of solutions for onboarding customers on mobile devices, as well as managing wealth and fighting fraud.

Barely heard from, perhaps to the relief of some, was the blockchain.

Here’s a quick rundown of the companies that presented in New York today, starting with the morning sessions — an account of Day 2 is here:

• Flybits showed a contextual concierge service for mobile banking.
• Empyr, born from Mogl, is an online to offline commerce platform.
• North Side demoed an IVR system and overcame significant technical difficulties.
• TravelNotes will embed travel information (and rewards) within banking apps.
• Yseop provides natural language reports based on spreadsheets of data.
• Inforce Pro provides insurance agents with intelligence to better serve policyholders.
• Xignite feeds market data to the financial services community, and announced a consortium of API providers.
• Gro Solutions reduces mobile onboarding friction using imaging.
• IDmission‘s Inform helps create secure online forms using biometric authentication.
• Jack Henry & Associates showed a consumer-first approach to core banking — account-as-a-service.
• TransferTo is a remittances platform with a broad and deep network of agents across the globe.
• CellTrust secures segments users’ personal mobile devices, providing secure communications for work.
• Blockstack.io offered blockchain-as-a-service, private blockchains for FIs.
• Trading Ticket showed TradeIt, a brokerage marketplace.
• ID Analytics announced ID Connect, an enterprise risk management, anti-fraud platform.
• Urban FT demoed a socially aware white-label mobile banking app with extensive financial management tools.
• Buzz Points presented a card-based rewards program with an emphasis on local businesses.
• Soundpays offered an intriguing soundwave-based payment system — like Clinkle, but real.
• ebankIT showed off full-features omnichannel banking middleware.

In the afternoon sessions:

• Adobe showed off its marketing cloud for financial services.
• Walletron demoed mBills, billpay for Apple Passbook (soon to be Wallet) and Google Wallet (soon to be Android Pay).
• Advisor Software showed off cloud-based, customizable software for investment managers.
• BehavioSec demoed behavior-based security, authentication, and analytics.
• Capriza showed a solution to bring legacy applications and workflows into the modern, mobile age.
• Alpine Data offered advanced analytics for wealth advisors.
• Crowdability presented market intelligence on private companies raising money through crowdfunding.
• Authy, a Twilio company, offers two-factor authentication to secures sites and services.
• Ormsby Street showed Credit HQ, information for businesses on the companies that owe them money.
• Alfa-Bank‘s Sense is a customizable mobile banking platform modeled on Google Now.
• Davo Technologies demoed a way for businesses to effortlessly (if not painlessly) pay sales taxes.
• AcceptEmail presented a hassle-free way to accept payments — and nearly took down the lights by hitting two beach balls with a baseball bat during its demo.
• Euronovate‘s biometric mobile onboarding tool employs tokenization and biometrics.
• HelloWallet gives users a financial wellness score and guidance on how to prepare for retirement.
• Fern Software offered customer relationship management tools for global banks.
• Dealflow uses data, including from social media, to find companies raising money and match them to investors.
• Auvenir took on the challenge of automating and digitizing notoriously paper-intensive audits. Good use of props!
• Avoka, a leader in reducing onboarding time and friction, showed off its cross-selling-while-onboarding tools.
• Trulioo is a global identity verification service with customizable data inputs for FIs.

Among the incumbents, Avoka and Banno/Jack Henry gave strong presentations, and from the insurgents, we’re interested to see more from Crowdability, Soundpays, Alfa-Bank, AcceptEmail, eBankIT, and Walletron.

Congratulations to all the presenters — the hard work and passion that go into a seven-minute presentation are perhaps not always apparent to everyone in the knowing, jaded fintech followers in the audience.

Today’s most interesting tale may have occurred offstage — perennial Best of Show MX, formerly known as MoneyDesktop, was a late scratch. The company noted merely that it was “unable to present,” though nothing appeared to be amiss. More to follow on this one.