Persint, StockSmart Begin Incubation Phase of Yodlee’s NEXT

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Finovate alumni Persint (Spring 2013) and StockSmart (Fall 2013) are starting off the week with a bang. Both companies have been selected to participate in Yodlee Interactive’s NEXT, a partner lifecycle program for fintech startups and entrepreneurs.

The goal of NEXT is to “promote and accelerate” innovation in the fintech space. The program consists of an initial incubation stage, during which the companies are given free access to Yodlee Interactive’s API for six months. Those companies that show “marked traction” will be invited to the second, acceleration stage and, after that, a final cultivation stage. The two latter stages give the startups opportunities to work with industry veterans and Yodlee partners.

Learn more about Yodlee’s NEXT program here.
Thumbnail image for YodleeLogo2012.jpgYodlee is a leading financial innovation platform, with more than 600 companies around the world using it to power financial applications and services. Headquartered in Redwood City, Yodlee last appeared on the Finovate stage in 2012 in New York, and will be returning to the Big Apple this year as part of FinovateFall 2013.

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Persint is a Finovate alumn that demoed its customer analytics technology at FinovateSpring 2013 in San Francisco. The Atlanta-based company was founded in March 2012 by Steve Coton and Curry Pelot. See their demo from earlier this spring here.
StockSmart will be making its Finovate debut in Sepember, joining us in New York for FinvoateFall 2013. Learn more about StockSmart here.

Finovate Alumni News– August 19, 2013

  • FinovateLOGO.jpgPersint among four new startups entering incubation phase of Yodlee Interactive Partner Lifecycle Program, NEXT.
  • Virtual Piggy to provide payment system to video game publisher Marvelous USA.
  • TSYS announces integration with FICO fraud management technology.
  • Monitise SVP of Strategy Richard Johnson talks about “making money mobile” at the Wired Money conference.
  • StockSmart joins Yodlee Interactive’s NEXT program for nurturing fintech startups. See StockSmart demo at FinovateFall in New York.
  • Fidor Bank customers to get access to social trading platform ayondo.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Finovate Alumni News– August 16, 2013

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  • SoftwareAdvice.com’s Plotting Success blog ranks MicroStrategy among top six best designs in iPad business intelligence software.
  • Business Bee’s The Daily Buzz takes a look at the LeafPresenter tablet from Leaf.
  • The Telegraph features Zopa in a column on P2P lending.
  • Ad News Australia reports on the rollout of MasterPass from MasterCard.
  • MyFoxChicago interviews Bolstr co-founder Larry Baker on the topic of funding for small business entrepreneurs.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Be a Part of It … FinovateFall is Coming to New York

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With less than a month to go, have you saved your spot at FinovateFall 2013?

Coming to New York’s Manhattan Center on September 10 and 11, FinovateFall 2013 will feature 70 of this year’s most enterprising fintech startups and familiar faces. Each company will take the stage to demo their latest technologies for an audience well on the way to topping 1,000.

And our signature format means that in addition to live demos from our presenting companies, you’ll have more than six hours over the course of two days to meet, greet, and get to know the men and women making tomorrow’s fintech today.
To that end, here’s a look by way of titles at whom you’ll be swapping business cards and connecting with at this year’s event. 

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And here’s a sample of some of the organizations that will be attending FinovateFall 2013 in New York in September.
                         
  • Aite Group
  • Alliant Credit Union
  • American Express
  • Bain Capital Ventures
  • BancVue
  • Barclays
  • BBVA Compass
  • Bloomberg
  • Blue Dun
  • Capital One
  • Celent
  • CIBC
  • Citi
  • CUNA Mutual
  • Deluxe Corp.
  • Discover
  • Ebay/PayPal
  • Experian
  • First Bank
  • FIS 
  • Flushing Bank 
  • Gartner
  • GE Capital
  • Google
  • GRP Partners
  • Inter-Atlantic Group 
  • Intuit 
  • MasterCard 
  • Microsoft 
  • Morgan Stanley
  • Mountain America Credit Union
  • Nationwide Bank
  • New York Bankers Association 
  • New York Life
  • Northwest Federal Credit Union
  • Novantas
  • Ovum
  • PNC Financial Services Group 
  • Silicon Valley Bank
  • TD Ameritrade
  • TechNewsDaily.com
  • Time Inc.
  • Travelex
  • US Bank
  • USAA 
  • Visa
  • Wells Fargo 
  • Yahoo! 
  • Zions Bank
For more on the event, including information on how to register and save your spot, visit our FinovateFall 2013 page here.

FinovateFall 2013 Sneak Peek: Part 1

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On September 10 and 11, Finovate will return to New York for FinovateFall 2013.

70 companies will take the stage to present their latest technologies, including many that will be making their Finovate debut.

In the weeks leading up to our September event, we’ll help you get to know the innovators and entrepreneurs who will be demoing in New York. Today’s installment introduces our first set of fintech presenters: CR2FinanceIt/CommunityLend, Financial Guard, FlexScore, Interactions Corporation, Place2Give, QuarterSpot and Socure.
Want to join us in New York in September? Get your ticket to FinovateFall 2013 here.
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CR2 is a leading multichannel banking software provider with a focus on innovation.
Features:
  • A never-seen-before customer experience at the ATM
  • Customized and interactive banking
  • Meaningful revenue driver for the bank
Why it’s great: ATM usability inspired by kiosk and mobile practices for both customers and non-customers.
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Martin Dolan, CEO, CR2
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FinanceIt/CommunityLend allows businesses to offer consumer financing to their customers anywhere.
Features:
  • Photo ID scan for instant approval
  • iPad app
  • Consumer-facing loan application for pre-approvals
Why it’s great: FinanceIt will be live in the U.S. Q1 of 2014 and is actively looking for partnerships with merchants and lenders.
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Michael Garrity, CEO, CommunityLend
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Financial Guard is an online investment manager reinventing the financial services industry by providing professional, unbiased, transparent, actionable investment advice to the individual investor.
Features:
  • Holistic investment portfolio optimization
  • Full transparency
  • Simple enough for a college intern. Complex enough for a Ph.D in Finance
Why it’s great: Investment Advice at the Right Price, Finally
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Kevin Pohmer, President, Financial Guard
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FlexScore is the first-ever, financial scoring tool and is specifically made to make financial education fun for middle-class America.
Features:
  • First-ever overall financial scoring tool
  • Provides actionable steps to help user improve finances
  • Peer ranking tool so users can compare scores
Why it’s great: First-ever personal finance too for middle America instead of the uber rich.

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Jason Gordo, CEO, FlexScore
Jason Gordo is listed in the Forbes Top 50 RIA’s in the country. He is also co-author of “FlexScore: Financial Advice for the Rest of Us.”

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Jeff Burrow, President, FlexScore
Jeff Burrow is President of FlexScore and is co-author of the book, “FlexScore: Financial Advice for the Rest of Us.” He is a certified financial planner.
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Interactions Corporation is a virtual assistant for banking/financial services
Features:
  • Customers interact exactly was they would with a live agent
  • Significant improvements in Net Promoter Score
  • Significant operations savings
Why it’s great: Simply better customer experience

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Phil Gray, Executive Vice-President of Business Development, Interactions Corporation
Phil Gray is a successful startup executive with extensive experience in speech and call center technologies.
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Place2Give helps advisors connect and manage their client’s charitable giving.
Features:
  • Matches donors to charities using unique algorithms
  • Shortens advisor research time
  • Manages donor’s pledges, disbursement and charity tax receipts
Why it’s great: The Toolbox helps reduce an advisor’s research time, justify fee value and aid client retention.
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Gena Rotstein, Founder, CEO, Place2Give
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QuarterSpot is a new small business online lending platform using artificial intelligence to significantly lower cost of capital and eliminate need for personal collateral.
Features:
  • AI underwriting better assesses business risk in minutes
  • Lowers SMB cost of capital up to 85%
  • No personal collateral at risk for business loan
Why it’s great: Small businesses searching for capital no longer have to compromise. QuarterSpot makes it easy, fast, and affordable to secure a trusted loan.
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Adam Cohen, Co-Founder, CEO, QuarterSpot
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Socure has developed a new form of online identity verification to reduce fraud using a series of proprietary machine learning algorithms to analyze social and identity data.
Features:
  • Authenticate a user to detect ID theft and account takeover fraud
  • Improve existing KYC/AML capabilities
  • De-risk each side of a social P2P payment
Why it’s great: Socure helps financial institutions use social data to reduce various types of online fraud. 

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Sunil Madhu, CEO, Co-Founder, Socure
Sunil Madhu is an entrepreneur and architect with 20+ years of experience developing and selling innovative enterprise software solutions.

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Johnny Ayers, Director of Business Development, Co-Founder, Socure
Johnny Ayers is a management consultant turned entrepreneur. He leads Socure’s business development and operation efforts.
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For more information on attending FinovateFall 2013, see our FAQ. To register, visit out FinovateFall 2013 page here.

Manilla Launches AOL Bill Manager

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Account management innovator Manilla announced today the availability of AOL Bill Manager for AOL account holders. 

The new free feature represents a deep custom integration between Manilla and AOL. The technology will allow AOL account holders to organize their bills and statements in their AOL Mail account inboxes or on AOL.com itself for free. Users can use AOL Bill Manager to scan for bills in other email accounts such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, as well.

Manilla organizes and automates the bill management process, giving customers text and email reminders to pay bills, renew subscriptions, and other calendar-cluttering need-to-dos. The technology provides unlimited storage capacity and easy document retrieval. 
       
The partnership with AOL represents the first of its kind for the fintech company, which has focused on its standalone product since its debut in 2012. AOL Mail users will be alerted to the availability of the new feature starting today. Currently available only on the desktop, a mobile version of AOL Bill Manager is expected soon.
Manilla recently announced that it has more than 500,000 activated users, and is on pace to reach more than 1,000,000 users by year’s end. Incubated and backed by the Hearst Corporation, Manilla demoed its technology at FinovateFall 2012 in New York. See the company in at work here.

Finovate Alumni News– August 12, 2013

  • FinovateLOGO.jpgTSYS announces support for Paynet’s “Great Migration to EMV” initiative.
  • Locaid CEO talks about verification services as a role for Location-as-a-Service companies.
  • Decisions management expert James Taylor reviews Yseop.
  • Former American Express Consumer Cards Services Group President Phillip Riese Joins peerTransfer Board of Directors.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Intuit Buys Tax Planning/Preparation Specialist GoodApril

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Founded in January. Launched in March (see their FinovateSpring 2013 demo). Acquired in August.

That pretty much sums up a very productive 2013 for online tax preparation/planning software company, GoodApril.

The company announced on Thursday that it had been acquired by financial services giant, Intuit, for an undisclosed amount. GoodApril had been scheduled to make their pitch at Techstars Boulder/Denver Demo Day when the news broke. Undaunted, the innovative startup made its presentation anyway, a presentation that must have seemed as much acceptance speech as elevator pitch.

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GoodApril’s Tax CheckUp solution allows users to anticipate and prepare for potential tax liability in the tax year to come. Headquartered in San Francisco, and having only three employees, the company bills itself as the tax software for “the other 364 days of the year.” Tax Checkup analyzes previous tax returns and makes recommendations over the course of the year to ensure that taxpayers pay only what is owed on Tax Day.
Intuit has already one popular product in the tax preparation software market, TurboTax. However, like most tax preparation software packages, TurboTax is designed to help taxpayers prepare tax returns for previous years. Good April’s forward-looking approach gives taxpayers a chance to make potentially money-saving changes before it’s time to file.

Finovate Alumni News– August 8, 2013

  • FinovateLOGO.jpgKofax announces completion of Kapow Technologies acquisition.
  • ACI Worldwide cites role of their Universal Payments Platform in net new bookings growth for 2013 in this week’s Q2 report.
  • The New York Times looks at Lending Club, Prosper, Zopa, On Deck, SocietyOne, and Kabbage as significant lending platforms.
  • Finextra reports: PayPal trials new geolocation payment service in London.
  • Leadfusion launches new RESPONSE interface for Premium Financial Tools.
  • Finect Founder Jennifer Openshaw moderates Best Practices in Compliant Social Media webinar. See Finect demo at FinovateFall 2013 in New York.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

PreCash’s PayConnect Helps Make Payments Faster and Cheaper

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One of the biggest gripes about mobile and online bill payment is that it takes “forever” to post (read 2-3 days), and if you want to (or have to) speed up the process, it’s just too expensive.

To solve this problem, PayConnect from PreCash leverages the company’s existing, cloud-based processing system to provide same day payment delivery for more than 80% of the transactions it processes. 

PayConnect allows customers to make payments at more than 10,000 utility, cable, and insurance companies, as well as other service providers. Customers can use both cash and cards for payment. 
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The company offers a pair of integration options: deploying into existing services by way of an API, or adding PayConnect as a white-label application with an online interface that can be branded.
PreCash CEO Steve Taylor cited a report from Aite Group that says more than half of consumers have made bill payments outside their bank, suggesting that “there is immense opportunity for innovative companies to unseat banks and incumbent providers by offering faster payments and a better user experience.”
PreCash serves more than 3 million consumers, processes more than $3 billion in payments, and has its products in more than 100,000 locations throughout the U.S. Headquartered in Houston, the company demoed Flip, their mobile check deposit solution for the underbanked, as part of the FinovateFall 2012 show in New York. See the company’s technology in action here.

Finovate Alumni News– August 7, 2013

  • FinovateLOGO.jpgMasterCard CEO Ajay Banga announces MasterPass digital wallet now accepted by more than 20,000 merchants.
  • EyeVerify reaches finals in four categories of the 2013 Silicon Prairie Awards.
  • Ralph Marcuccilli, president and founder of Allied Payment Network, talks about the benefits of photo bill pay.
  • ProfitStars introduces hosted version PROFITstar Budget Manager, supported by Windows Azure for cloud computing. First Interstate Bank replaces Excel-based budgeting process.
  • U.S. PayPal users given option to withdraw money using MoneyGram.
  • London Loves Business blog highlights Nutmeg, Zopa, and Wonga as well-known London-based fintech startups.
  • Cardlytics names Jim Morgan as first CFO. Come see Cardlytics demo at FinovateFall in New York September 10 and 11.
  • PreCash launches PayConnect mobile and online bill pay platform.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Finovate Alumni News– August 5, 2013

  • FinovateLOGO.jpgZopa featured in a Scottish Express column on P2P lending in the United Kingdom.
  • MasterCard and Visa to bring standardized chip-and-pin technology to the U.S.
  • Azimo, Zopa, and Lending Club are among the Finovate alumns highlighted in an Economist column on “changing finance for the better.”
  • VentureBeat lists BillGuard as 1 of 20 fastest growing mobile startups.
  • Slate lists reasons why everyone should download and use Braintree’s Venmo app.
  • Digital Trends chats with Basil Anan, CoverHound CEO on insurance rates trends. Check out CoverHound’s new tech at FinovateFall in NYC next month.
  • Braintree listed by Pando Daily as one of Chicago’s “new class of anti-Groupons”.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.