By the end of Alpharank’s Best of Show winning demo at FinovateSpring last month, few doubted that connectivity was the key to everything from customer retention to providing more personalized services. Alpharank CEO Brian Ley had just shown how his Customer Influence Mapping technology enables FIs to spot highly-networked “influencers” among their customer base, and how to leverage those influencers to build better engagement and a more customized UX.
“If you’re an aggregator of financial information, you’re sitting on one of the most valuable data assets in the entire world,” Ley said, “Alpharank can help make it significantly more valuable.”
And now, in addition to its Best of Show trophy, Alpharank can add earning a spot in the FIS 2017 VC Fintech Accelerator to its list of accomplishments. The company was one of ten selected for the 12-week program, emerging from a field of 295 applicants from around the world. All ten companies will get mentoring and training from FIS and the Venture Center, and will receive a monetary investment of $50,000, with a potential to earn an additional funding of up to $300,000.
Pictured: Alpharank CEO Brian Ley demonstrating his Customer Influence Mapping technology at FinovateSpring 2017.
“This program is a great example of how we are harnessing the spirit of entrepreneurship with the power of applied innovation to bring breakthrough products and services to our clients,” FIS president and CEO Gary Norcross said. Lee Watson, CEO of the Arkansas-based Venture Center, added “together we provide fintech startups with proven go-to-market training, C-suite level mentorship and access to top financial institutions.” The program, which began last week, will end with a Demo Day with potential investors, community leaders, and entrepreneurs on July 26 at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Alpharank demonstrated its data-as-a-service technology at FinovateSpring 2017. With a backstory of virus mapping and spotting top influencing “brand ambassadors” in retail, Alpharank emerged in 2015 as a builder of APIs that help FIs turn their transaction data into predictive social graph data. “We take two to three years of credit or debit card data. We pump it through Alpharank,” Ley said. “Alpharank then tries billions of network combinations to find the correct social graph. And we deliver that back to the FI.” Alpharank only requires the customer ID, merchant ID, a time stamp, and a total to build the graph and the outputs can be visualized in a three-dimensional model that makes it easy to identify top influencers and their connections.
Pointing to one key influencer (“Sam”) in a graph produced during the company’s FinovateSpring demo, Ley explained how targeting key influencers and their connections can play a major role in improving engagement. “If you’re trying to spread something like a credit card or a mobile banking app, start with Sam first,” Ley said. He added, “Even if you have to take him out for dinner. He’s going to speed up your adoption curves throughout the network.”
Now in its second year, the VC Fintech Accelerator is sponsored by FIS and The Venture Center. Alpharank is the second Finovate/FinDEVr company to participate in the program; FinovateFall 2015 alum bleu was a member of the Accelerator’s initial 2016 class.
Joining Alpharank in the summer 2017 program are:
- Alto IRA
- Bond.ai
- eGiftify
- Hedge Hog
- Plinqit
- Omnetrium
- Quotanda
- WalletFi
- Xplanr