CheckFree, Credit Karma, Mint and MoneyAisle Win Finovate Best of Show Awards

image As conference host, I haven’t quite recovered from the whirlwind of activity yesterday. I’ll post a final conference wrapup tomorrow, but I wanted to get in a quick update with the Finovate 2008 Best of Show winners. 

We had planned to award it to the top three, but there were four companies in a virtual tie at the top (note 1), so we named four winners this year.

In alphabetic order, the winners:

  • image CheckFree which demonstrated its new online banking platform packed with new features
  • image Credit Karma which showed several new features including a tool allowing “what-if” calculations with your credit file
  • imageMint which announced its move out of beta and demo’d several new investment management functions
  • imageNeosaej which showed its unique MoneyAisle real-time, reverse-deposit auction service

Congratulations to these four companies and to everyone else who made the day so interesting.

About the voting
All attendees not affiliated with the presenters rated each demo on a scale of one to six. The ballots were turned in at the end of the final demo session. Approximately 70% of eligible voters turned in complete ballots.

Note:
The companies didn’t finish with the same average scores, but rounding to the nearest tenth created a four-way tie.

Finovate 2008 BillShrink

image Drum roll, please. Our final presenter today is Peter Pham, CEO of BillShrink.

Menlo Park, CA-based BillShrink launched its new service in July.

The service is designed to help consumers find the best deal in various categories. Today they showed the credit card selector. The service provides detailed breakdowns of fees and rewards to allow consumers to compare across more than 200 cards in the market.

Launching today is MyAccounts which allows users to track their accounts more easily.

BillShrink also tracks wireless carriers and allows users to find the best mobile phone deals.  

BillShrink announced an $8 million dollar funding today.

Finovate 2008 Digital Insight

image Next up is Digital Insight, now part of Intuit. Karen Van Kirk, director of small business solutions, will conduct the demo.

Calabasas, CA-based Digital Insight will be demonstrating its Small Business Finance Works online banking platform.

FinanceWorks has all the same functionality of Quicken Online. The small business version has been designed to be simple and easy to use for the small business manager. The accounts receivable function includes integrated email capabilities to send personalized payment reminders on the fly.

The service includes integrated remote deposit-capture capabilities.

Finovate 2008 mFoundry

image The last of our mobile demos is from Carlo Cardilli, SVP business development & sales, at mFoundry

mFoundry is a mobile banking provider founded in 2004. The San Francisco-based company has worked with Citibank among others.

What’s New
mFoundry just launched the second native banking app, available through the Apple App Store. The demo showed a fictitious bank, but the bank that launched the app with mFoundry is IBC.

The iPhone app has full online banking and payments capabilities. It also has an ATM/branch finder that uses the location-based or GPS capabilities in the iPhone.

Finovate 2008 Thrive

image The second-to-last presenter today is Thrive from Loudwater Labs. CEO Avi Karnani will be conducting the demo.

New York City-based Thrive is the latest entry in the online personal finance market.

What’s New
Thrive is making its official debut today at Finovate. They use a red light/green light system so it’s easy to see what needs attention quickly.

Thrive calculates a financial health score from the user’s data. Then Thrive shows users specifically how they can improve their score. The recommendations show financial institution products that can be used to achieve cost savings (i.e., product placements such as Mint).

On average they are recommending $1500 worth of savings for users.

Thrive has a wizard to help you see how much house you can afford.

Thrive today is announcing a partnership with Credit.com to allow users to track their credit score over time and improve it.

Finovate 2008 Mint

image Mint CEO & Founder Aaron Patzer will be presenting next. 

Online personal finance provider Mint launched a year ago and won a Best of Show award at our first Finovate conference in 2007.

What’s new
Mint moves out of beta today, with 500,000 users. Their sign-up rate has more than doubled in the past 3 weeks.

Today they launched new investment tracking functionality that allows Mint users to track their accounts at more than 1000 investment companies, mutual funds, and retirement services.

A unique aspect of its investment tracking is the ability to see the value of the account vs. the cost basis.

Mint has an IRA Rollover Advisor where they are partnering with Fidelity, Scottrade, E*Trade, and Schwab.

Results: 10% of users have changed investment behavior and 50% of users have changed their spending behavior by using Mint.

Finovate 2008 mShift

image Next we have Awele Ndili, CEO of mShift.

Founded in 1999, mShift is one of the oldest mobile banking providers and now supports 120 clients.

Today, mShift is showing its new mobile business banking solution with full payment capabilities.

Active Messaging System was also demo’d. It’s a new multi-channel alert system that enables alerts to text, voice, email or fax.

Finovate 2008 Yodlee

image At the halfway point of the afternoon session, Peter Hazlehurst, SVP of products at Yodlee, will demonstrate.

Yodlee introduced its personal finance platform eight years ago.

Yodlee has 15 million registered users across all of its clients.

Today they are showing Pay Today, an expedited payment system that works in partnership with Western Union. They will be working with 5 of the 7 largest credit card issuers by year-end. Payment capabilities now tie together personal finance with payments, so users can take action to avoid fees or improve their returns.

All the capabilities are available through their software developers kit.

Finovate 2008 MoneyAisle

imageNext up is MoneyAisle from NeoSaej. Mukesh Chatter, president & CEO, will demonstrate.

The Burlington, MA-based company launched its auction-based deposit service this summer.

MoneyAisle demonstrated a reverse auction for a CD with a winning bid of 4% APY by Commerce State Bank. The company emphasized that it’s fully transparent with no ads, and the consumer can choose at the end whether they want to accept the bid and purchase the deposit.

Finovate 2008 CheckFree

image CheckFree is up next. Steve Shaw, director of strategic marketing, will demonstrate this afternoon.

CheckFree, now a division of Fiserv, will be showing its Online Advantage online banking platform. CheckFree presented at the first Finovate a year ago.

What’s new
Online Advantage will be introduced later this year. The platform includes integrated billing statement views and payments.

The service also allows for integrated remote-deposit capture, so customers can deposit paper checks using a scanner.

Finovate 2008 Credit Karma

image The next presenter is Kenneth Lin, CEO of Credit Karma and Nichole Mustard.

Credit Karma has developed an ad-supported, free credit-report service that launched earlier this year. The company first showed its service at our Finovate Startup conference in April.

What’s new
Credit Karma showed credit score trends by Internet service provider, with Gmail users leading the pack.

Credit Karma today is introducing a credit card simulator, which lets you run what-ifs on what would happen to your score if certain things happened. For instance, it shows that if you applied for a new credit card, the example score would drop 15 points. If a late payment occurred, it would drop more than 50. 

Finovate 2008 Lending Club

image Next is Lending Club. CEO Renaud Laplanche will do the demo.

Lending Club was the second person-to-person lender in the United States, launching on Facebook in May 2007 and on the Web in September. It’s been operating on a limited basis since March as it sought SEC registration for its loans. The company presented at the first Finovate last year. 

What’s new
Lending Club is back online as of today. The company received approval of its registration documents with the SEC. They are the only P2P lender to have a trading platform, i.e., a secondary market enabling lenders to resell loans they’ve made through the Lending Club platform. The platform is powered by Foliofn.

They have been experiencing a 2% default rate and have been approving 14% of applications received.

Lending Club showed tools that allow lenders to select a desired portfolio of loans based on various risk criteria.