2013 Innovators to Watch: 30 to 35
31. John Schulte, CIO, Mercantile Bank of Michigan
What, you haven’t heard of MercBank? It was only the first bank to partner with PayPal for P2P payments and Bill.com for billpay. Schulte is a believer that banks must partner with startups to succeed, and further believes that community banks’ freedom to act can make them better innovation partners than the big guys. MercBank offers a full suite of mobile offerings and is exploring new ways to bring in Gen Y customers through innovative social media offerings and partnerships with a local university.
32. Frank Mastrangelo, President & COO, The Bancorp Bank
Frank Mastrangelo has worked in banking since the early 1990s. At the helm of The Bancorp, he is the man behind the bank behind some of the most innovative financial services companies on the market today. As a private label bank, The Bancorp’s name recognition is only strong among those in the know. The company provides banking services to more than a hundred companies ranging from prepaid cards such as that offered by PayPal, debt-solution companies like Smarterbank, and even bank account alternatives such as Moven and Simple.
33. Iker Marcaide, founder, peerTransfer
PeerTransfer is a solution for the pain point of international payments, which are slow, expensive, inconvenient, and confusing. The service has particular appeal to international students making tuition payments, which is how founder Iker Mercaide, a native of Spain who had difficulty paying MIT in 2008, came up with the idea. The site offers a simple process and excellent customer service offered in realtime via Skype in multiple languages.
34. Scott McCormack, president, SmartyPig LLC / Social Money
Scott McCormack had a long pedigree in financial services when he took the helm of SmartyPig, a savings account service, in late 2011. McCormack renamed the company Social Money and opened SmartyPig up for whitelabelling. The move links the product with the social banking trend — people want to share savings goal, McCormack says. Whitelabelling, meanwhile, lets bankers hungry to offer better savings account products in an interest-starved era a service that doesn’t suck.
35. Howie Wu, VP virtual banking, BECU
When Howie Wu and his team started up remote deposit at BECU, officially Boeing Employees Credit Union, one of the nation’s largest credit unions, they expected a big result, say 5,000 deposits a month. They got 20,000 in the first two weeks and averaged 90,000 a month for the first four months. Wu is guiding the credit union as its tech-savvy members move quickly to adopt the tablet. Even the older members are in on the action — it’s Seattle, after all. Wu’s partnerships with startups and innovative social media (nice Facebook page, Howie) and have propelled BECU forward, but Wu remains modest in his goals. “We like to be out in front, but not at the bleeding edge,” he told Bank Innovation.
