Lenders stole the show — and won the two awards — at the BBVA Open Talent competition, held last Tuesday in New York.

This is the seventh year the competition has been held, according to Gustavo Vinacua Acosta, director of the innovation center at BBVA. The event was part part of FinTechX, put on by NYPAY, Consult Hyperion, and and Next Bank.

Seventeen startups took the stage after a rousing keynote by Dwolla CEO Ben Milne (on just one cup of coffee, he boasted) and a panel featuring Simple CEO Josh Reich, Bain Capital Ventures Managing Partner Matt Harris, and Jay Reinemann of BBVA Ventures.

Interestingly, there was more discussion of bitcoin and the blockchain at BBVA’s event, with just 17 companies, than at Finovate, with 70 presenting companies.

Here is a quick rundown of the companies in the first session:

• Koho is a retail prepaid account that employs comparisons to millennial peers
• Saaspass is proximity based two-factor authentication, born out of a long painful career in juggling multiple security credentials
• WeFinance is a loan crowdfunding service with strong social connections that apparently appeal to millennials.
• Draft is investment analysis for mass-affluent millennials. It uses machine learning but is not a robo-advisor — it uses crowdsourced information from actual humans.
• Dyme: Set a goal, send a text, save with Dyme. This texting-based saving tool uses humor and text prompts to encourage a saving habit.
• Modernlend offers credit to worthy international residents in the U.S., who often lack credit information and therefore access to credit.
• Snapcard is a bitcoin wallet with an emphasis on foreign exchange to Latin America.
• Voats allows voting via mobile app with biometric authentication. It’s a Reddit favorite and product of Yodlee’s incubator
• Epiphyte employs blockchain technology to connect banks to blockchain. Transactions piggyback on other distributed ledger transactions (and are therefore limited to small amounts, for now).

The second session featured eight companies:

• LendingFront is a cloud-based small business lending platform for banks. It provides clients with alternative scoring data and manages risk.
• ClearServe provides business intelligence across asset classes. The problem it attacks is the lack of transparency in investment accounts.
• Rippleshot provides merchant data to combat card fraud and limit bank exposure. Rather than look at customer data, Rippleshot looks at changes in merchant behavior to locate nodes of fraudlent behavior, i.e. compromised merchants.
• Control manages payments for merchants and provides realtime alerts on sensitive data. It aims to solve the payment reconciliation problem for banks
• Bitwage offers cloud-based, cross-border, real-time digital payments for payroll.
• Token is building a new payments rail apparently using existing bank systems.
• Sizeup provides big data to small businesses to learn about nearby competitors. It offers a heatmap of activity by ZIP code.
• Coinalytics brings realtime intelligence to decentralized platforms. Helps companies analyze risk in global transactions.

ModernLend and LendingFront were deemed the winners by the panel of judges. The next event will be in Barcelona, while the previous one was in Mexico City. Six winners in total will be chosen.

Here’s a taste of BBVA’s Open Talent event in Europe last week:

Find more fintech startups at Bank Innovation Israel, Nov 10-11. Click here for details.