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Today, prepaid product company InComm announced it has acquired digital gift solutions company, Giftango.
This is expected to expand InComm’s reach into the digital gift card industry, giving it access to Giftango’s relationships with more than 150 brands and network of more than 80 partners.
Giftango, which was acquired for undisclosed terms, will become a subsidiary of InComm and will continue its operations in Portland, Oregon.
To learn more about InComm, watch its FinovateFall 2011 demo.
Prepaid mobile wallet provider Emida announced today that it has signed an agreement to provide prepaid services in Myanmar.
As a part of the agreement, the prepaid network has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the following parties:
Emida is now operating in 37 countries scattered throughout the globe, supporting a network of more than 54,000 retailers and seeing annual payments of over $1.5 billion.
To learn more about Emida, watch its FinovateFall 2012 demo.
The Financial Brand investigates how Mitek’s bill payment service can aid customer account switching.
I knocked around Apple App Store last week researching our year-end Online Banking Report. Below are the current top free finance apps in the U.S. store (note 1). While there are not a whole lot of surprises, several are notable:
Methodology: I first listed the top 50 iPhone apps from the “Free Finance” category (column 2). Then I went to the iPad store and found their corresponding iPad app rank (column 3). I then listed all the remaining iPad apps in the top 50 and their corresponding iPhone rank (last 20 rows below).
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Top iPhone/iPad Finance Apps in Apple App Store (USA)
| Company | iPhone Rank | iPad Rank |
| PayPal | 1 | none |
| Chase | 2 | 3 |
| Bank of America | 3 | 1 |
| Mint (Intuit) | 4 | 5 |
| Wells Fargo | 5 | 2 |
| TurboTax (Intuit) | 6 | 31 |
| Capital One | 7 | none |
| TaxCaster (Intuit) | 8 | 16 |
| Credit Karma | 9 | none |
| American Express | 10 | 7 |
| Discover | 11 | 13 |
| Citibank | 12 | 10 |
| USAA | 13 | 8 |
| State Farm | 14 | 47 |
| LearnVest | 15 | none |
| Yahoo Finance | 16 | 11 |
| Easy Envelope Budget | 17 | 42 |
| US Bank | 18 | 26 |
| Lemon | 19 | none |
| Pageonce | 20 | 23 |
| Fidelity | 21 | 12 |
| Manilla | 22 | none |
| Identity Guard (Intersections) | 23 | none |
| Navy Federal FCU | 24 | none |
| PNC | 25 | 19 |
| iSpending | 26 | 116 |
| Barclaycard | 27 | 35 |
| Mortgage Calc (Zillow) | 28 | 20 |
| TD Bank | 29 | none |
| Quicken Money Management (Intuit) | 30 | 17 |
| TD Ameritrade | 31 | 27 |
| FreeCreditScore.com (Experian) | 32 | 55 |
| Pocket Expense | 33 | 15 |
| ING Direct (Capital One) | 34 | none |
| Quicken Loans | 35 | none |
| E*Trade | 36 | 33 |
| Spending Tracker | 37 | 28 |
| SunTrust | 38 | none |
| Western Union | 39 | none |
| iSpreadsheet | 40 | 9 |
| BB&T | 41 | 46 |
| Virtual Wallet (PNC) | 42 | 40 |
| Bloomberg | 43 | 22 |
| Budget | 44 | none |
| Expensify | 45 | 53 |
| Ally Bank | 46 | none |
| HSBC Personal | 47 | none |
| H&R Block | 48 | 24 |
| Bluebird (AmEx) | 49 | none |
| Seeking Alpha | 50 | none |
| Below top 50 iPhone | ||
| Craigslist mobile | not in finance | 4 |
| Money Magazine | none | 6 |
| ShareBuilder (Capital One) | 114 | 14 |
| CNBC | 55 | 18 |
| Real-time stock tracker | 64 | 21 |
| Vanguard | 58 | 25 |
| Morningstar Stockinvestor | 198 | 29 |
| Personal Capital | 92 | 30 |
| Regions Bank | 54 | 32 |
| Visual Budget | 62 | 34 |
| Merrill Lynch | 84 | 36 |
| Bloomberg TV | 125 | 37 |
| Mortgage calculator (Trulia) | 102 | 38 |
| SmartMoney Retirement Planner (Dow Jones) | none | 39 |
| Bills for iPad (iBear) | not in top 300 | 41 |
| Budgets for iPad (iBear) | 162 | 43 |
| Checkbook free | 53 | 44 |
| Smart Budget | 120 | 45 |
| TD Ameritrade Mobile Tracker | 86 | 48 |
| EZ Financial Calculators | 63 | 49 |
| Schwab | 60 | 50 |
Source: Netbanker observation of Apple App Store directly from iPad and iPhone around 6 PM Pacific, 7 Jan 2013
None = No app listed with the App Store for that device
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Note:
1. The Apple ranking system is a bit of a black box. But it’s generally believed to weigh heavily recent download activity.
2. Easy Envelope Budgeting (#18) is from a San Francisco-based Web developer Dayspring Technologies founded in 1998.
Alternative payment system Dwolla announced on Friday it has partnered with a school district in Iowa to enable online payments for school lunches.
After signing up for Dwolla, parents and guardians with
children attending Iowa schools in the Beaman, Conrad, Liscomb, Union, and Whitten (BCLUW) district can pay for lunches online on a weekly, bimonthly, or monthly basis.
There is no transaction cost for parents, and because Dwolla only charges 25 cents for payments over $10, it can save schools a significant amount of money on credit and debit card fees.
According to the blog post, Dwolla is seeking additional partnerships with school districts.
To learn more about Dwolla, watch its FinovateSpring 2012 demo.
Martin Dolan, CEO of CR2, made a number of interesting observations on mobile banking in a recent interview with AllAfrica.com.
The topic of the conversation was the role CR2 is playing in the Cashless Lagos Project sponsored by the Central Bank of Nigeria. The goal of the project is to reduce the costs of handling cash, and to eliminate fraud in the system.
The following four points on the role of ATMs in countries like Nigeria were especially noteworthy.
Dolan also noted that more than 95% of the transactions in Nigeria are via ATM according to the Nigerian Central Bank. Be sure to check out CR2’s new banking technology at FinovateEurope next month in London!
Transactional banking is fairly straightforward. There are electronic payments, ATM withdrawals, debit card payments, credit card charges, and checks.
When a technology comes along that offers to combine three of those in a familiar form factor (plastic card), you would think it would catch quickly.
But combined credit/debit cards have not gained much of a following yet. With one big exception: Fifth Third Bank.
In 2011, the Cincinnati-based bank, the 15th largest U.S. retail bank with $120 billion in assets, launched a combined credit/debit card called DUO. According to American Banker this week, “(DUO) has recently accounted for about 25% of new credit card accounts” at the bank.
My take: That may or may not be a large number depending on the bank’s overall card marketing efforts, but it’s a good indication that there is at least some consumer demand for the so-called hybrid card. Personally, I stopped carrying an ATM card years ago, so I would love having ATM access added to the credit cards I tote around. I would even pay a modest fee for the convenience (note 2).
True, the mobile wallet holds the promise of combining everything into one grand app. However, it’s a long, long road to mass adoption. Seventeen years into online banking, it’s still used regularly at less than 60% of U.S. households (note 3).
So bring on the hybrid cards, but make sure there is also a killer mobile app supporting them.
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Fifth Third landing page for its combo DUO card (link)
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Notes:
1. It’s been 17 years since Web access was first launched by Wells Fargo (May 1995). Dial-up online banking predates that by more than a decade, but it was used by such a small group that it doesn’t really rate a mention.
2. “Modest” would be in the $1/mo neighborhood, unless there more features were added.
3. Source is our annual forecast (subscription, Jan 2012) which we are in the process of updating and will be available in a few days.
Late last year, Experian announced that it had developed a web-based searchable database to help plow through consumer credit data. And now, fellow Finovate alum, Credit.com has put the database to use.
IntelliView uses a representative, 10% sample of Experian’s database, which tracks more than 200 million customers in the United States. IntelliView allows searches and queries based on several categories:
Credit.com used the web-based query analysis software to create a list of the top 10 states in terms of highest average bank card balance in the third quarter of 2013 (the last quarter for which data was available).
The data for IntelliView is the same as that used by Experian-Oliver Wyman Market Intelligence Reports, which accesses Experian’s aggregated quarterly consumer credit data. The service is available by subscription from Experian.
See Experian’s latest Finovate demo here. Credit.com’s most recent demo at Finovate is here.
Mobile banking solutions company, Monitise, announced the appointment of a new CFO and Executive Director today.
The company has selected Brad Petzer (pictured) to replace John Brougham after his 
retirement in October of last year. Petzer will take up the position of CFO in April of 2013.
Prior to accepting the role as CFO, Petzer served as Group Financial Controller at Europe-based Telecity Group.
Monitise demoed at Finovate 2007.
Bremer Bank to implement Fiserv’s mobile banking and payment technology.
With a battle cry of “save time, money and trees” the Paperless Coalition has launched its campaign to promote a paper-free workplace.
Among the members of the Paperless Coalition are three Finovate Alumni: Xero, Manilla and Expensify. The Coalition is led by HelloFax, and has set-up a website, paperless2013.org where businesses can “take the pledge” to work toward using less paper – and sign up for the coalition’s monthly newsletter.
Also participating in the Coalition is Google via Google Drive.
To see Xero’s most recent Finovate demonstration, click here. Manilla’s last Finovate demo is here. Expensify can be seen in action here.