Customer Service Solutions Dominate Day 1 of FinovateFall
If Finovate Spring was dominated by companies in lending and underwriting, then Finovate Fall was all about startups and service providers equipping banks with tools to help them provide better customer service. Whether that’s through data analytics, sales, CRM or even helping banks build better tools, the fintech companies demoing at Finovate in New York were all about helping the banks cater to their customers in a more efficient and personalized way.
Of the 40 companies that demoed in New York on the first day of Finovate, more than 25 dealt directly with enabling banks to improve their data analytics, security, CRM and even AI/ML capabilities, so that the banks, in turn, could provide consumers more personalized products and services.
Here are five that caught Bank Innovation’s attention (in alphabetical order):
Based in Russia, Ak Bars was launched only in 2016. This company works with financial institutions by providing them with the technology to authenticate payments through facial recognition. At the finovate conference, Ak demoed its Face2Pay tool, which enables payments facial recognition by providing FIs with video validation SDK. Face2Pay demoed both on Day 1 and Day 2 at Finovate, once as Ak Bars and once as Face2Pay.
Check out how it works here.
Onboarding new customers, as well as existing customers to a digital platform, is an important but tedious task for many banks, especially if you’re a smaller bank or credit union. Digital Onboarding, as the name would suggest, hopes to help with this. Based in Boston, the fintech works specifically with smaller banks and credit unions on this front. With an investment from Salesforce Ventures, the company was founded in 2015. Digital Onboarding is currently working with banks and credit unions like Leader Bank, Somerset Trust Bank, Alliance Credit Union and Foothills Credit Union. The underlining technology uses machine learning to target the customer through email and/or text in a personalized way to prompt onboarding.
See how it works here.
Not a startup, per se, given that Relay was founded about eight years ago. Relay is a UX or user experience builder platform that provides banks and FIs an interesting way to communicate privately with their customers. Relay is best described as a private one-on-one digital feed between the bank and customer. The feed, like one on social media, time stamps all conversations between the two parties. A customer only has to scroll through the feed to look back on past conversations, actionable items or responses. The customer can communicate to their bank through comments, but also emojis and pictures. Relay’s platform leaves it up to the bank to customize what the feed looks like and how the customer can interact.
So far, Relay already has 23.7 million users and works with Citizens Bank, Independence Blue Cross, and Comcast. The company, based in Radnor, Pa., has so far raised $26 million from investors like NewSpring Capital and First Round Capital.
Founded in 2016 and based in Boulder, Colorado, PasswordPing is a cybersecurity company that works with banks and FIs sort and block compromised credentials as well as prevent account takeovers. At the conference, it demoed its account takeover and credentials stuffing solution, which is a web-based API service that feeds on a cloud-based database collected from the internet and dark web to screens all logins in order to identify compromised passwords and credentials. Based on Monday’s demo, PasswordPing keeps track of exposed credentials and passwords, and helps FIs to prevent such breaches.
Founded in 2016, and based in Riga, Latvia- Nordigen is a lending focused data aggregator and analytics provider that works with banks to automate a lot of the backend portion of a loan-application process from verifying income to verifying liabilities, raising red flags as well automating the borrower’s past loan application history. Thanks to open banking technology and APIs, Nordigen is also able to provide the bank risk analysis and credit models, enabling them to make faster decisions on a particular loan.
Of course, Finovate wasn’t all about helping the banks help its customers. Other topics such as SMBs, biometrics and wealth management were also prominent on stage with startups like Enova Decisions, SalesMove, Bucket, Ocrolus, PaperID focused on SMBs. And while wealth management and robo-advisors were absent at Finovate Spring , the subject seemed quite popular this fall with fintechs such as Bumped, Systelos and ETF Logic trying to democratize investing.
Want details on the demos from Day 2 at Finovate, click here.
