SAN JOSE, Calif. — It’s time to relegate the phrase ‘frictionless’ to the FinTech trashbin.

It will join words such as “omnichannel,” “disruption,” and “mobilefirst” in exile. All were used so often that they lost all meaning and just plain got on everyone’s nerves.

Removing friction from financial services — with or without calling it “frictionless” — was a major theme at Finovate here yesterday, as was squeezing the most functionality out of payment cards.

The first presenter, Yee Lee, CEO and co-founder of Vouch, “the first social network for credit,” started the trouble with “frictionless.” Lee made an ironic reference to friction in his presentation, and that put the audience on watch for mentions of the word for the rest of the day. Lee said, “Sometimes a little friction in onboarding can be a good thing,” while showing off his app, which had a conspicuously smooth onboarding process. But the crowd didn’t seem to catch the joke and was surprised to hear friction used positively. (We think Koho used friction positively, but that’s another matter.)

Vouch uses social connections that can “vouch” for a borrower to lower loan rates and raise credit limits. “Our borrowers get 6.5% lower rates that they could get on their own,” Lee said, which is not the usual sales pitch from alternative lenders. Vouch also showed off its product at the Lendit conference in New York last April. While social inputs are rapidly becoming commonplace in lending, an approach as personal as Vouch’s is not.

Payment card functionality is increasing almost to the point of absurdity. Dynamics showed off its latest creation bearing the MasterCard logo, which contains a special hack-proof embedded chip, a dynamic card number, a push buttons to change functionality. CEO Jeff Mullen referred to it as a “computer in a credit card.” Stratos demoed its card that can hold multiple payment cards, boasts two separate magstripes, and features tap technology to change between cards. Finally, in one of the most interesting uses of a payment card to date, Kabbage displayed a MasterCard that, when swiped, initiates an installment loan for a small business. Kabbage’s card is powered by payment processor Marqeta and can get money to businesses more quickly, with Kabbage taking on some risk while the card payment is processed and the loan is issued.

Dynamics has been trotting out increasingly complicated cards over the year, all of which would probably deeply confuse your grandmother. But the growing sophistication of cards as payment instruments seems to point, perhaps paradoxically, to the coming ascendancy of mobile payments — mobile devices are typically required to manage these complicated cards anyway.

Here are some other presentations that hit the mark today:

MoneyAmigo, a bank account targeting the 47% of Hispanics in the U.S. who are underserved. It contains financial guidance, responsible credit products, remittance services, and (controversially) a fuzzy green mascot.

TickerTags uses social inputs to help guide investors of publicly traded stocks. It resembles Social Alpha in some aspects, but has a wider range of inputs and employs crowdsourcing to help generate tags. It is due to launch in three weeks.

DRAFT is another investment app. It allows comparisons with peers, crowdsourcing, and social sharing, with the goal of cutting through complexity and helping users understand their portfolios. Strong UI.

Finicity is an API account aggregation service, to allow others to build financial products. (Plaid comes to mind.) APIs, incidentally, were barely mentioned today, as was bitcoin. The company showed off a flashy integration with Venmo.

Dealstruck is a small-business lender with a variety of loan products, one of which involves Dealstruck in essence buying a company’s invoices. When the invoice is paid, the money goes to Dealstruck.

Cloud Lending Solutions proposed a system where lenders that rejected loans could auction them off to other banks. Is this company’s head in the clouds? On its face, the concept resembles BankAssetpoint, which is a marketplace for actual loans — but loan applications are another matter.

Digital Insight, an NCR company, offered an enhanced experience at branches and ATMs through the use of geofencing and beacons. Customers open to receiving offers can get personalized pitches at the branch — or even in bank advertisements or from partner merchants. Several banks are currently testing this service.

Day 2 coverage from Finovate Spring 2015 is here.