Expensify
Alumni News — Week of December 29, 2010
Alumni News — Weeks of December 13 and 20, 2010
To see Finovate news updates in real-time, follow our feed on Twitter.
Backbase explores mobile banking in its fall webinar series. http://bit.ly/finovate1293
BlazeMobile creates smart payments sticker.http://bit.ly/finovate12133
BrightScope releases top 30 retirement plans. http://bit.ly/finovate12143
Capital Access special report on “Black Friday” and small business sales data. http://bit.ly/finovate1282
SunTrust has added the “Transfer Now” product suite from CashEdge including person-to-person and me-to-me transfers. http://bit.ly/finovate12165
ClairMail and Cardlytics partner to provide transaction marketing opportunities. http://bit.ly/finovate1281
Expensify is hiring for multiple positions. – The company is currently looking for Web developers and computer engineers at several levels. http://bit.ly/finovate1216
FIS launches innovative new mobile banking product. — Users can establish mobile account management with their debit card, no online banking signup needed. http://bit.ly/finovate1291
Geezeo selected by University Federal Credit Union as PFM provider. http://bit.ly/finovate12151
GoalMine hosting cash contest via Facebook to spread the word. http://bit.ly/finovate1292
Kapitall closes series A funding round. — The company did not release funding amounts or sources. http://bit.ly/finovate12163
Congratulations to Mint founder, Aaron Patzer, winner of a TechFellow Award for General Management. http://tcrn.ch/finovate1296
Mozo powering new “Compare, Ditch and Switch” campaign. — The services allows Australians to shop around for better banking services. http://bit.ly/finovate1283
Just in time for the Holidays, PopMoney gift cards at www.giftcardmall.com.
SmartyPig launches cash rewards card with only a one-time activation fee of $4.95. http://bit.ly/finovate12134
Victrio receives $5 million investment for voice-printing technology. http://bit.ly/finovate12141
Alumni News — Weeks of November 28 and December 5, 2010
Weekly Updates — Weeks of Oct. 25 and Nov. 1, 2010
How to Do a Great Demo #3 — Let Your Product Have the Stage
This is a guest post from John Fishback of 154 Consulting, the firm that helps us coach the innovative fintech companies selected for Finovate on their demos.
Titling this post was difficult.
“Actually demonstrate your product,” “Remember why your company
exists,” and, most simply, “Don’t read a script” were all in contention.
The
titling difficulties were because this post focuses on how to avoid
some of the problems that plague less successful Finovate demos —
those that lose the audience early or leave them wondering why the
presenting company came to the conference.
The
classic examples are those demos that feature a presenter using their
seven minutes to give a short speech about the industry or about the
history of their company, only occasionally rambling near to what’s
being shown on the screen, and stopping only when they reach their time
limit and their microphone is mercifully cut off.
At
the other extreme, and almost as difficult for the audience, are the
presenters that are so worried about their time and message that they
read closely from an over-worked script, leaving the Finovate
auditorium feeling stuffy and dull.
These two problems feel very different. But they come from the same root cause, and can be addressed by the same three tactics.
The
root cause of both problems is that the presenter failed to let the
product tell its story. If your product is compelling enough to have
been selected for Finovate, there is something about it that will move
the audience. Putting that powerful thing, rather than your view of
the industry or even the details of your company, center stage is the
first step towards a solid demo.
keep your demo compelling, use these three tactics: get right to the
product, explain the customer’s problem, and use good scripting.
Control got this right at Finovate this spring in San Francisco. CEO Andy
Greenawalt did a great job of putting his product in context, and then
got right to the demo. Compliance is a complex and inflammatory issue;
he could have spent three or four minutes framing out the challenge.
But he didn’t. He started showing off the product, and wove detail
about his customers’ challenges throughout the demo.
a rule of thumb, if you are spending more than a minute
talking before you direct the audience’s focus to the screen, you
should do some hard thinking about whether any portions of your
introduction could be built into other parts of your demo.
worst demos show amazing technology that’s hunting for a problem to
solve. The best demos help the audience understand a customer problem
and demonstrate how the product solves that problem.
Expensify’s
FinovateSpring 2010 demo centers around the manager that
approves expenses. CEO David Barrett explains the frustrations of the
approving manager, and then shows how Expensify’s whiz-bang technology
makes those frustrations disappear.
I’d
like to be very clear on this. Carrying a word-for-word speech text
onto the stage at Finovate is a bad idea. Nothing will kill audience
interest more than your reading from the page in front of you.
At the same time, thinking through what you are going to say is crucially important.
To
break the compromise, start by thinking about the customer’s problem –
solving that situation is why your company exists. Then choose the key screens you
need to show from your product to explain how you solve that problem.
For
each screen, you need to do three things: navigate the audience to the
screen, describe what they see on the screen, and then explain the
importance or meaning of what they’ve seen. For example, you might say
“Let’s look at our login screen” (navigate), “Here customers enter
their username and password” (describe), “We do this because everyone
else in the entire world does login this way, so it is familiar to the
customer” (importance/meaning).
consistently directs our attention to the screen, describes what’s
happening, and then tells us why the functionality Billeo provides
makes customers’ lives easier.
Scripting
in this way ensures that the product remains the audience’s main focus
and prevents you from wandering off topic, while avoiding over-scripted
stuffiness.
(There
are exceptions to the rule. iPay technologies did a great job of
showing how their product works through a tightly scripted demo, but
they put in a great deal of rehearsal time to make that work, and the
script remained focused on the customer problem.)
For
Finovate demos, it is the product that matters most. Failing to put
the product first creates a variety of problems, and is the shared
characteristic of the least effective demos. Successful demos follow
many different approaches, but all focus clearly on the presenter’s
product.
This is a guest post from John Fishback. John is the principal of 154 Consulting and directs 154’s Financial Services Product Group, which combines message development and presentation advice services with financial services industry experience to help financial services companies, startups, and vendors develop and market products that speak clearly to customers’ needs. He can be reached at john@154consulting.com.
Last Chance for FinovateSpring Early-Bird Tickets — Only 2 Days Left to Save!
Just a quick reminder that the early-bird ticket prices for FinovateSpring 2010 (May 11, San Francisco) will expire at the end of March (less than 2 days from now). If you register by March 31, you’ll save $100 on your ticket and lock in your spot to see debuts and demos of dozens of new financial and banking technological innovations.
We’ve handpicked an amazing list of companies to demo their latest including:
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Tickets are selling well with hundreds of registered attendees from great organizations like:
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FinovateSpring is one of our twice-yearly showcases of the best new ideas in banking and financial technology. The show is built around a unique blend of fast-paced demos of actual technology (no slides!) and high-quality networking with an audience of senior FI executives, fintech entrepreneurs, VCs, press, industry analysts and bloggers. It’s an awesome environment to find your next competitive edge.
Don’t miss out on the early-bird price on your ticket to this great show. Register now!
P.S. Online Banking Report subscribers are entitled to an extra discount to our Finovate conferences. Email me to get it.
Eric Mattson is CEO of Online Financial Innovations, the parent company of NetBanker, Online Banking Report and the Finovate Conference Series. He can be reached at eric@netbanker.com.
FinovateSpring 2010 Demo Companies Revealed
We’re very pleased to announce the lineup for the upcoming FinovateSpring 2010 conference. Taking place on Tuesday May 11 in San Francisco, the conference will showcase dozens of handpicked companies debuting and demoing their latest and greatest fintech innovations. The quality of the new ideas that will be demoed on stage is very high this year and we’re incredibly excited to showcase them to you.
The demoing companies selected (that we can reveal so far) are:
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These companies will be showcased to an audience of senior financial/banking/credit union executives, influential press, industry analysts, venture capitalists, bloggers, tech companies and entrepreneurs.
A sampling of the great organizations already registered to attend includes: AARP, Aite, Alliant Credit Union, BNP Paribas, Capital One, Celent, Discover, Experian, Fidelity, Filene, Forrester Research, Google, Highland Capital, Intuit, Javelin Strategy, Jack Henry, Mechanics Bank, Motley Fool, NY Times, PayPal, Tower Group, USAA, US Bank, Venrock, Wells Fargo, and Wired Magazine.
We’d love to have you join us at the spring event and watch the future of finance/banking unfold onstage. If you register today you’ll save $100 via the early-bird ticket discount. Please note that the early-bird prices expire at the end of this month and space is limited so lock in your spot now!
Eric Mattson is CEO of Online Financial Innovations, the parent company of NetBanker, Online Banking Report and the Finovate Conference Series. He can be reached at eric@netbanker.com.
Xpenser Masters Mobile Expense Input
Launched in Oct. 2007, Xpenser (see note 1) is a financial tool designed for tracking items for business expense reports. Monthly traffic is about 6,000 unique visitors according to Compete.
To understand Xpenser, visualize how Mint works, then think of the opposite.
- Mint is full automated; Xpenser is all one-off data entry.
- Mint has graphics that will blow you away; Xpenser has lists.
- Mint requires you to divulge your banking usernames and passwords; Xpenser just needs your email address.
- With Mint, you can track your bank accounts, investment accounts and net worth; Xpenser only helps you submit your next expense report.
Xpenser’s mission from its website:
We were fed up with how painful expense reports and tracking were. After many experiments we found a workable solution: record expenses as soon as they happen and forget about them.
How it works
After a registration process that requires no more than your email address, you can begin immediately submitting expenses to the service via:
- Email by sending a message to e@xpenser.com with the free-form expense listed in the subject line
- iPhone optimized site (see inset); it’s not in the App Store, but you can add an Xpenser button to your iPhone by navigating to the Xpenser website and pressing the + button
- SMS by sending a text message to 66937 (MOZES), using “exp” followed by the free-form expense description
- Voice via Jott or Dial2Do (both free services)
- Twitter via direct message from your registered Twitter account
- IM via Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Google Talk
- Browser search box in Firefox or IE 7+ (see below)
- Secure website via standard input form
Once the expenses are collected, users go online and move each expense to the appropriate report. Transaction amounts and descriptions can be edited.
The company is building open APIs, so developers, including banks, can use the service to kick-start their own personal finance tools. The company says it will build premium fee-based versions with long-term archives along with other features.
Xpenser competes directly with Expensify (see note 2), a company that will be demo’ing at our upcoming FinovateStartup conference.
Data entry via the browser search box
Although, it’s not a core piece of the program, I was perplexed when I saw that one of the methods of entering expense data into your Xpenser account was through the “search box.” That was probably what convinced me to sign up for the account.
Here’s how it works in Firefox (also works in IE 7+ and any browser that supports OpenSearch):
- Navigate to the Xpenser website
- Click on the drop-down area next to the browser search box
- Add Xpenser as a “search engine”
- Then simply type the expense amount and description in the search box making sure that Xpenser is the selected as search engine (see second screenshot below), and press enter; Xpenser recognizes your account through cookies and adds the “search term” to your data file
That feature is so clever, it’s almost creepy. I’m not sure a bank would want to use this feature since it could capture any search term the user inadvertently input while the bank’s “search engine” was selected in the browser search box.
Xpenser main account page (30 March 2009)
Input via the browser search box (30 March 2009)
Notes:
1. Not to be confused with FinovateStartup alum, Expensr, now part of Strands.
2. Expensify has abandoned the decoupled debit business model it was using when we wrote about it’s launch last fall (previous post). It now offers the choice of a prepaid MasterCard or an American Express-issued card.
3. For more information, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features for Online Banking and our Online Banking Report on Social Personal Finance.
Expensify Launches Decoupled Credit/Debit Card Using Prepaid Model
Like Rate Surfer, which we wrote about yesterday, Expensify launched its new employee expense-management system from the TechCrunch50 DemoPit this week.
The San Francisco-based startup (note 1) combines a payment card with a Web-based expense manager and uses cellphone cameras to upload pictures of receipts to match against purchases. It’s a banking triple play: card, online, and mobile.
The target market is smaller businesses that want to automate expense report preparation, approval, and reimbursement to their employees.
How it works
The heart of Expensify is a prepaid, decoupled credit card. I know that doesn’t make sense, but here’s how it works:
- Sign up for an Expensify MasterCard prepaid debit card.
- Load it with value from any credit or debit card, Visa, MasterCard, or American Express.
- Make purchases with the Expensify MasterCard.
- As each purchase clears, the prepaid balance is lowered, triggering an automatic “top off” charge of an equal amount to the consumer’s credit card, thereby returning the prepaid balance back to the original level.
Metabank is the issuer; here are terms and conditions.
Analysis
At first blush Expensify sounds pretty amazing. An expense management card that rides on top of your regular card, with mobile and Web-based integration. Brilliant, until you start thinking about costs. There’s that pesky thing called interchange. What Expensify has done is create two card transactions instead of one, doubling the amount of interchange paid.
To cover the extra interchange and create some revenue for itself, Expensify levies a 3% transaction fee on the cardholder. Although the card is otherwise relatively fee-free, that’s a significant surcharge.
Why would anyone pay 3% extra in order to use the Expensify card when they already have a credit card? The company believes that small businesses will pay the fee in order to get the expense-manager features and to help employees separate business expenses from personal ones. Businesses could have multiple Expensify cards tied to different categories of expenses (see screenshot below).
A business with just $1000/mo in expenditures would pay $360 per year. In addition, the business would tie up several hundred dollars in a prepaid account, because the only charges cardholders can make must not exceed the prepaid balance held in the Expensify account.
I think the expense-management concept is good, especially with the mobile receipt integration, but it’s just too expensive in its current format. The founders should try to move to an ACH-based “topping off” process and remove the transaction fees.
But regardless of how this specific product performs, the integration of payments, online and mobile, is a huge trend. If Expensify is nimble enough, they may be able to ride the wave.
Expensify homepage (10 Sep 2008)
Note:
1. Since I didn’t see contact info on their website, here’s what the founders provided at TechCrunch50: Expensify, 548 Market St. #61434, San Francisco, CA 94104, Phone: 801.745.9064