Last week I spent some time at Finovate Fall 2017. The event has historically focused on company demos, where various companies showcase their product in a live demonstration. This year, they expanded their content to include panel discussions on days three and four. This was my first time attending Finovate and my primary interest was seeing some of the innovative things companies are working on.
There were over 70 companies demoing and I was not around to catch them all, but wanted to highlight a few of them here. The videos from the event can be found on Finovate’s website.
Fiserv
Fiserv is a technology solutions provider that provides a wide variety of services. For their demo they shared their solution for proximity authentication and integration with Alexa. They also have a browser that offers secure sign on across other web applications. What was most interesting with this demo was the integration with Alexa. Voice command is something that is becoming a bigger part of everyone’s lives and there are already many things you can do with these devices. Integrating voice within financial services makes a lot of sense and every bank is going to need this technology as consumers begin to demand it. Their proximity authentication can help better serve customers in branches. Fiserv is clearly on trend with this new product.
Jiffee
I have to admit that I am not a user of mobile payments, but Jiffee caught my eye for a few reasons. It is a mobile payments solution that works across both Android and Apple. They also offer a dongle for retailers to be able to handle contactless payments. While payments is somewhat of a crowded space with huge competitors such as Square, PayPal, Apple and Android I thought Jiffee has built a very easy to use solution. The audience agreed as they were one of the demoing companies to be awarded with a Best in Show Award.
Dynamics Inc.
Dynamics has created a next generation credit card, creating a battery powered card that can have a variety of features. Some of the use cases include being able to select whether you want to pay using debit/credit or what rewards you’d like to use for the transaction on one single card. Even more interesting was the ability to have a dynamic cvv (the three digit number on the back of your card) which could cut down significantly on fraudulent transactions. This type of technology is something I have never seen before so it was fascinating to see it in action.
Conclusion
Finovate attracts quite a broad range of fintech companies. These are the companies that are pushing finance forward and Finovate has created a venue for startups and established companies to share a glimpse of what we can expect in the future. There were many other demos that I missed so I’d recommend checking them out for yourself.
