INV Fintech, the sister accelerator to this site, is pleased to announce its second class of startups, in its Fall session, which begins this week.

The five companies, selected from more than 100 startups applicants from across the globe, are:

• Debitize
• Grain
• Paymentpie
• Saldo.mx
• SnapCheck

The companies, chosen after a comprehensive review process that involved INV’s partners, touch on a broad array of profound trends in the fintech space, such as credit building for millennials, social investing, and cross-border bill payment. INV is a global, virtual accelerator — which is what allows INV to host companies from not just Silicon Valley, but New York and Mexico City, as is the case with Class 2. The startups will be mentored by INV and its partners, which include Fiserv, U.S. Bank, BBVA, and BB&T Corp.

Here are details on our startups:

Debitize

Americans struggle to use credit cards responsibly. Nearly half of American households are in credit card debt, and spend over $115 billion a year on interest and late fees alone. Misuse of credit is also the third leading cause of bankruptcy in our country. Some customers use budgeting tools that simply show them their balances, but don’t really change behavior. The most common solution today, particularly among millennials, is to avoid credit cards altogether in favor of debit cards. Debit cards help you stay on top of your spending by taking money out of your checking account immediately after every purchase, and eliminate the hassle of paying a monthly bill. However, they do not help you build credit, do not offer the same rewards, have inferior security and fraud protection if your card is compromised, and don’t offer a host of other benefits and perks of credit cards.

Debitize brings together credit card rewards and credit building with the responsibility of debit card use.

Grain

Grain helps users find and make investments in the stock market. Its search tool, powered by IBM Watson, translates concepts, themes, and keywords from everyday life into relevant stocks and ETFs. Users can share insights and observations with family and friends to make confident investing decisions together. They can also warm up with Grain’s virtual stock market, then link a brokerage account to make real trades when they’re ready. Grain supports major U.S. brokerages.

Grain was founded during a class at Notre Dame University, where the founders studied the impact of mobile phones on financial inclusion and realized that it is now possible to enter the world of investing easily and confidently.

Paymentpie

Ask yourself, how many paid services do you use? And how about your company? How much do you pay per month or year? Do you know if you have options for paying less? Have you ever tried to unsubscribe from these services? If you have several (Paymentpie’s founder has 22) paid subscriptions, and if you need to update payment info — well, sorry for you.

Paymentpie eases the woes of dealing with recurring payments. The company has so far focused on consumers, but it has clear applications for the business space, as well.

Saldo.mx

Saldo.mx is a mobile app that facilitates the cross border bill payment for immigrants. Mexican emigrants can use Saldo.mx from anywhere in the U.S. to pay for public and private utilities in Mexico such as water, electricity, phone and micro-insurance to help their families in Mexico. Remittances to Mexico from the U.S. totaled $28 billion in 2015, making it one the world’s busiest remittance corridors.

Saldo.mx makes contracts with utilities and service providers in Mexico to accept payments through its platform. For these transactions Saldo.mx gets a commission paid from the companies, not the senders or receivers.

The system is supported by data analytics that help Saldo.mx to get to know its users better, authenticate transactions, and prevent fraud. We see the opportunity for Saldo to apply its remittance model globally.

SnapCheck

Over 18.5 billion checks, worth more than $26 trillion, were written last year in the U.S. Why?

SnapCheck empowers businesses to escape the hazards and costs of using paper checks to make B2B payments. A mind-boggling 92% of businesses use paper checks as the primary mechanism for paying vendors and suppliers, while 70% of B2B transactions are still conducted using paper checks. SnapCheck reimagines checking with a service that is 100% compatible with the existing banking infrastructure, substantially reduces the $54 billion cost of check sending and processing to businesses, and virtually eliminates the $20 billion in fraud losses that banks and businesses sustain annually due to paper checks.

SnapCheck leverages the existing checking infrastructure to provide easy creation and delivery of highly secure digital checks, right from the payer’s mobile device, desktop, or existing accounting software package. For the payer, there’s no longer any need to physically write and send paper checks, at a savings of $4 to $20 per check, as well as the operational costs of implementing the fraud detection tool Positive Pay.

INV Fintech startups are participating in a comprehensive mentorship program that will run through the end of the summer. The mentorship is supported by the accelerator’s partners, Fiserv and a group of financial institutions, as well as mentors and API partners. INV startups also demo at a members-only event that is held in conjunction with Bank Innovation 2017 in Silicon Valley on March 6-7. Applications are being accepted for the Spring 2017 class here.