While the demos at Wednesday evening’s night NY FinTech Startups Meetup weren’t the best — one demo-er seemed to simply refuse to speak into the mic, for example — the vibrant crowd there at Dechert LLP offices bodes well for banking innovation out of Silicon Alley.

Jon Zanoff, the host of the startup, started the evening by stating clearly that New York was not the center of FinTech startups in the US. That distinction is held by Silicon Valley. However, Zanoff said that the Meetup was one small step in taking that title, because New York certainly is the financial capital of the world.

Nearly 130 people attended the Meetup. I attended a similar Meetup in San Francisco in March, and it drew a crowd similar in size, I estimate. Let the competition begin!

I sat next to someone who does commercial financing for suppliers to L’Oreal, the makeup company. Did he have a startup he was working on? No. He told me he was just interest in the FinTech startup scene, so he showed up.

That’s kind of how it is going these days. FinTech is arguably one of the more dynamic startup sectors out there, probably because the perception is that there is more money in banking than in, say, mobile news. And as they say, perception is reality.

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I saw three demos: iBillionaire, Ballooning Nest Eggs, and ACE Portal. A brief report on each:

IBillionaire allows users to track the stock buying and selling of — you guessed it — billionaires. The concept is interesting not necessarily because mimicking the investing behavior of billionaires is worthwhile, but because there is no doubt a population of people who think it is. That means iBillionaire will get audience, and audience has value. But like so many investment applications, users cannot transact through iBillionaire, no doubt because of the regulatory constraints, and that restriction limits the site’s utility.

The guy I was sitting next to me muttered as the founder of Ballooning Nest Eggs demoed: “She obviously has no idea how a social network actually operates.” I don’t know if I would go that far, but the service is far from impressive. The UX is a mess. The idea behind the site is to allow grandparents and such to put money into nest eggs for their grandchildren upon various occasions. If little Jimmy hits a home run in Little League, Grandpa Max can put $10 into Jimmy’s nest egg and notify the youngster that he scored in more ways than one. The site addresses a need, I agree, but the founder did little to dispel security concerns – and the fact that she didn’t know how to use a mic worked against her.

ACE Portal was the best of the lot I saw. The site offers an online portal for private securities sales through placement agents. Think of it as a kind of CRM on steroids for securities sales. Clearly, the market is large and the user experience is well thought out. The founder discounted competition from Second Market or crowdfunding, but I’d venture to say that ACE faces a bigger threat from Bloomberg, Reuters or MarketAxess Holdings. Still, it got not a mutter from the guy sitting next to me – and that’s saying something.