Mobile wallet and security are top of mind for the financial services industry these days. Both issues were well represented at Finovate Spring 2013 in San Francisco  Bank Innovation attended and chose the four companies that offered an interesting, desirable product with an easily identifiable ROI.

Our account of every presentation is presented in the following four posts:

Morning Day 1
Afternoon Day 1
Morning Day 2
Afternoon Day 2

The entire show was on a grand scale this year, with 1,300 attendees and an inspiring crop of 72 presenting companies. The following companies from that impressive crowd earned our Best of Show honors.

OneID
OneID stood out from the crowd of security options at Finovate because of its ease of use emphasis on the pain point of passwords. Passwords, in case you haven’t noticed, are difficult to create, and the secure ones are difficult to remember. This cloud-based consumer-facing solution aims to create on secure identity for users to use across sites. OneID relies on the mobile phone for authentication and works across channels. Its one-click sign-on will be familiar to young users accustomed to the less secure social sign-on, and its ambition to get rid of “shared secrets,” which are certainly shared but hardly secrets in the age of Google and social media, is a good one.

TipRanks
TipRanks is a browser plugin that rates and ranks stock market analysts. When a user is on a page with stock market analysis, TipRanks will perform a search based on the analyst, pull up past results and compare him or her to peers, and produce a rating. This is giving a user a great deal of useful information with a simple click. It’s easy to see other applications as well. Looking for a hotel? Why go to a site that specifically rates hotels when you can look at the data from any number of similar sites using a plugin? Several attendees downloaded and installed the plug in and were using it before the 7-minute demo ended.

PayNearMe
PayNearMe’s innovative solution for accepting cash payments is simple and elegant. A user goes to a partner location (a 7-Eleven, for example) and hands over, for example, his rent payment along with a payslip, which be printed or displayed on a mobile device. The store gives him a receipt and the money is deposited by PayNearMe in the landlord’s bank account. This innovative payments solution is now being whitelabeled and the response from banks is said to be great. It didn’t hurt that the company’s presentation, employing sandwich boards standing in for ATM machines, was very funny and held the audience’s attention.

Allied Payment Network
Allied Payment Network, along with mobile banking platform provider Malauzai, is pioneering PicturePay, a way to pay bills using the smartphone camera or the user’s voice. A click imports the biller’s information and loads it into the user’s billpay setup. This creative use of the smartphone camera reduces a huge pain point – adding billers – and increases stickiness. After just three months, adoption of PicturePay is 30% higher than traditional mobile billpay, the company said in its presentation. This technology is highly useful and will be widely adopted in coming years.