In the Bank Account of the Future, Context is King

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Three companies gave Finovate attendees a look at the bank account of the future yesterday: Moven, CBW Bank/Yantra Financial, and NAMU.

The second and concluding day of the conference saw 31 companies show their wares, and a major theme was providing context around transactions.

As Ron Shevlin notes in Smarter Bank, banks have moved from competing on location to competing on rates to competing on helping customers manage their money. Moven, CBW, and NAMU all showed how they can help customers, in particular by adding context around transactions to help customers see their financial situation more clearly.

Moven CEO Brett King offered a glimpse at what the financial service startup will offer this summer. The company will update its app to make it easier to save on impulse, and will even recommend savings amounts to put into a “vault.” It will also offer instant categorization of purchases – the end of PFM, King said – as well as a wish list of things to buy, which King said was different than the “goal paradigm” offered by other services. Perhaps most significantly, Moven will offer “emergency credit” for in-store purchases where the user does not have enough money to cover a purchase. (Moven customers should know how much they have, and spend responsibly, but still, a neobank offering credit in any capacity is something to be noted.)

CBW Bank, presenting with its affiliated company Yantra Financial, emphasized “speed, intelligence, and context” as the keys to its “bank account of the future.” CTO Suresh Ramamurthi showed off CBW’s instant payments, which work both in-country and across borders. “We completely rebuilt the payment rails,” Ramamurthi said. He also showed how much context the bank provides around transactions, showing a $5.00 gas purchase using the company’s new ONECard debit card that included the make, model, and mileage of the car. How this information came to be on the receipt was not explained, but it is clear that CBW is determined to push the boundaries of what a bank account can offer. Ramamurthi described the efforts of his team as “relentless,” a word not often heard on the Finovate stage this week.

NAMU Systems is the product of ex-Citibanker Thomas Ko, who said he was inspired by past Finovates to launch the cloud-based bank account, and Piotr Budzinski. The account is “social, visual, emotional, and contextual,” Ko said. It features multiple integrations with social networks and Uber and other companies within the app, employs large photos to indicate sections of the account, and “permission-based offers.”  Calling NAMU “joyful banking,” Ko said the account would be a delight to use and would be truly customer-centric, offering geolocation services, complete transaction histories with contextual data, and a host of other features reminiscent of Poland’s mBank.

Other presenters of note were two companies offering receipt-tagging, Shoeboxed and Slice. (Slice also offers package tracking and other services.) Receipt capture and tagging was described as a soon-to-be-standard feature in banking, but it’s hard to see why when Moven will automatically categorize transactions. Tagging transactions is not exactly a favorite activity of your average user, and while there is a use case for business, it’s hard to see millennials getting excited about this.

Token is looking to eliminate shared secrets from authentication and instead rely on a series of digital signatures. At one point, CEO Steve Kirsch authorized a transaction on stage using his mobile phone and FitBit – take that, Apple Watch!

Aurora Financial Systems showed off its budgeting tool NOTE, built on top of MX and other PFM offerings. NOTE will actually deny transactions if the purchase would impinge on a customer’s pre-established goals. Does any customer want to his transaction to fail at the POS for any reason?

LoanNow is another lending solution that employs multiple borrowers to help get better rates and raise loan amounts. Several conference attendees commented that a host of lending solutions are using crowdsourcing and friends and family to help people get loans they wouldn’t otherwise receive, and questioned its wisdom. Does it mean the good times have gotten a little too good and credit should not be extended quite so freely, or is it the beginning of a new paradigm for lending?

Alpha Payments Cloud took integration to the extreme, offering integration with just about every payments processor known to man. The product is somewhat reminiscent of Spreedly’s payments gateway. The offer to be included on the AlphaHub was extended to any Finovate attendee with a payments company.

Corezoid is an nCINO-esque cloud banking layer that can be installed on top of aging core systems. It is live with Privatbank, Ukraine’s largest bank.

Seven companies were awarded “Best in Show” by conference attendees: Alpha Payments Cloud, Avoka, MoneyAmigo, Moven, NAMU Systems, Shoeboxed, and Stratos. But to us, the “Best in Show” was context in banking.

Read coverage from Day 1 of Finovate Spring 2015 here.