Is Finovate really the FinTech startup showcase it is cracked up to be?

Yesterday, the folks at Finovate circulated an email boasting of registration topping 1,100 people for the upcoming spring event, which starts in San Francisco in several days. And while I don’t want to dash the expectations of attendees, those of you heading to San Francisco to see startups will certainly see them — but perhaps a smaller number than you might think. As the event has become established, so are more of the presenting companies.

Bank Innovation took a hard look at the presenting companies expected at the spring event, Finovate’s flagship gathering, and found that but 43% of them are truly new startups. The rest of the presenting companies, companies like Fiserv, Microstrategy, Intuit and IntelliResponse are well-known, and, in some cases, were established years ago.

The truth is the 31 of 72 companies presenting at Finovate Spring that are truly startups represent a fraction of the FinTech startups out there. Bank Innovation is monitoring 380 — yes, 380 — financial services-related startups that were launched in just the last three months. In only the first seven days of this month, 31 financial services startups have been kicked off. Are all of them going to be successful? Of course, not. Some are tangential to financial services, to be sure, such as BumpUp.org, a charity crowdfunding platform, but others are certainly not (skyauth, Heeeelp.me, Planancial).

Some financial services executives see Finovate as a “one and done” solution for identifying startups, but the data and the market strongly indicates that it is not.

Disclosure: Bank Innovation was a media sponsor of Finovate in previous years, but is no longer.