SANTA CLARA, Calif. – New takes on lending and underwriting dominated the opening day of demos at FinovateSpring 2018 here yesterday.

But this being fintech’s leading demo showcase, the featured startups offered up these basic, fundamental aspects of banking in a new way, often with “artificial intelligence” under the hood.

Six of the 28 demoing companies directly dealt with lending:

1. Zuma, an invoice financing platform
2. Kasasa, whose Take Back loans allow borrowers to pull pack extra payments they’ve made on loans
3. Stratyfy, using AI to help with loan decisioning
4. Supermoney, a loan offer engine and marketplace
5. Baker Hill, SME and auto loan origination software
6. CUneXus, one-click consumer lending promising to end loan applications as we know them

Several of these companies are definitively not startups, it should be noted.

Many other solutions dealt with lending indirectly, all using analytics or artificial intelligence to supplement or enhance human decisioning.

AI, meanwhile, was pervasive. It was mentioned in perhaps half the demos — a sure sign that the term is being overused. Anytime an algorithm is looking for patterns, it was labeled “AI.”

But there were several companies built around an algorithm, or series of algorithms, that might pass a stricter test for what is artificial intelligence. Alpharank, which builds social graphs using anonymized transaction data, was one. Two others were Ephesoft, which finds structure in, and build reports from, unstructured data, and Kyndi. Financial services are a web of relationships, Kyndi CEO Ryan Welsh said, “yet, we continue to operate as if the world was flat.” Artificial intelligence must be explainable, Welsh said, because regulators may ask how lending decisions were made, and lenders can’t shrug and point to the “black box” of AI.

Barely mentioned — perhaps just once, and then in passing — was blockchain. Cryptocurrency came up in the multicurrency wallet solution Paysend, but nowhere else in any significant way. No one says “big data” anymore, thankfully, because what did it even mean?

There were a number of investing and PFM platforms, as well, with financial wellness and education thrown into the mix. Buckit bucked this trend: “Education and information don’t work,” Buckit CEO Umar Syyid said. Financial wellness takes practice, he said. You have to do it, reading about how to do it doesn’t help.

A final theme running through several companies was serving the underbanked with innovative payment products. It seems technology is at a point where new features can be built into payments products, as with Acorns. MoneyAmigo even offers low-cost healthcare service as part of its cashback Visa debit card.

The funniest demo was Mawi. It involved a lot of praying that transactions would go through, jumping rope to elevate the heat rate (Mawi’s solution is a biometric authentication wristband that displays one’s ECG at a point of sale — heartbeat-as-password) and money flying back and forth to Ukraine in realtime over conference wifi (which was very good).

Our guesses for Best in Show? Kasasa, PaySend, MoneyAmigo. Honorable mention, Kyndi

Day 2 coverage of this event is here.