PayRecs, a business-to-business payments startup, won the first annual Banking Automation Summit DEMOvation Challenge today. The company made it to the final round of judging, along with data science marketplace GravityAI. Finalists were determined by attendee voting.

“The simplicity of the idea and how it’s bang-on the use case and the audience was really compelling,” said Alex Sion, director and co-head of D10X at Citi Ventures. Sion was one of the judges for the challenge, as was Denny Boyle, managing director of fintech at Silicon Valley Bank, an $86 billion bank that serves startup founders.

In addition to the company’s focused mission, Boyle said the judges liked that PayRecs offers an easy, consumer-like user experience to target regional bank partners. The company offers an option to small businesses directly on its website but opted to focus on building partnerships with banks earlier this year .

St. Louis-based PayRecs allows businesses to send and track international payments, input invoicing details and calculate exchange rates. According to the company, many regional banks don’t have their own rails in place to handle international business payments, so they rely on larger banks for the service. 

“We wanted to take all the great innovation that was happening around peer-to-peer transactions and B2C transactions and the simplicity that those products delivered, and we wanted to deliver that same simplicity, intuition, easy-to-use products to the B2B space,” said Jon Dobson, co-founder and CEO of PayRecs. According to Dobson, PayRecs has seven active companies using its platform and total payment volume of over $25 million.

DEMOvation runner up GravityAI, meanwhile, offers a range of automation solutions and algorithms for institutions to easily incorporate into their businesses. The San Diego-based startup allows data scientists to upload solutions for institutions to shop, and then scans the solutions for malicious code and accuracy. GravityAI contracts with institutions shopping its marketplace, so procurement times are shorter than if institutions were to directly partner with data science vendors.

“We are an app store for data science solutions,” Daniel Huss, founder of GravityAI, previously told Bank Innovation. “Our technology wraps [data science solutions] in what’s called a ‘container’ that makes it easy for a buyer to essentially download it like an app, virtually code-free.” Huss told Bank Innovation the company has four paying clients. 

See also: How Citi, PNC and SVB incubate from within

Sion has worked with D10X, Citi’s internal innovation pipeline, for more than two years. He was previously the general manager for mobile channel at JPMorgan Chase. Boyle has been with Silicon Valley Bank for almost 14 years and has been the managing director of fintech for more than five years. Although the experts picked PayRecs, they admitted it had been a tough decision, and the popular vote during the final round had actually gone to GravityAI.

“We liked GravityAI as well,” Boyle said, with Sion adding that it had been a difficult decision to make in the 30 seconds the judges were allotted to confer.