Finovate 2008 SmartHippo

image The first demo of the afternoon is from George Favvas, co-founder and CEO of SmartHippo.

SmartHippo is a mortgage-loan marketplace that combines user-generated content with rate information scraped by SmartHippo bots, and received directly from lenders themselves. SmartHippo was a presenter in Finovate Startup last April.

SmartHippo is launching a new rate engine later this month that has more than 200 lenders. They are concentrating on mortgages today, but are looking at other verticals in the future.

Finovate 2008 Loanio

image The final demo of the morning is from Michael Solomon, founder of Loanio.

Loanio, which launched Oct. 1, is the third person-to-person loan marketplace to open in the United States. It provided a sneak peek of its platform at Finovate Startup in April ’08.  

Loanio believes this is a great time to launch a P2P lending company. Both borrowers and investors are looking for alternatives.

Solomon walked the audience through the Loanio loan application process — emphasizing the option to have a co-borrower, a first for a U.S. P2P lender — and the optional Platinum loan listing, which includes a host of verifications to give lenders more assurance the borrower is being truthful on the application.

Finovate 2008 Fiserv Galaxy

image Our second-to-last demo of the morning is MyMoney from Fiserv’s Galaxy unit. Brian Bellhorn, director of marketing, will conduct the demo.

MyMoney is an application that allows customers to view their bank account balance and transaction info within their Facebook account.

The MyMoney application was launched earlier this year and was initially available to Galaxy customers only. Now the service is available for any Fiserv customer. It’s an extremely affordable option.

The MyMoney program includes an online enrollment option. It helps financial institutions find new customers on Facebook. It also encourages word of mouth, by making it easy for users to tell their friends about the program.

They closed the demo by saying that during their 7-minute demo, 1200 more people will have signed up for Facebook. Clever.

Finovate 2008 Rate Surfer

image The next demo is Rate Surfer, a new credit card management program from My Best Interest. CEO Mitch Calderwood and Jackie Myers, director of communications, will make the presentation.

Rate Surfer is an easy-to-use software program designed to help users manage their credit cards and save money. The company says you can be up-and-running in just five minutes.

Rate Surfer uses account-aggregation technology to download balance and credit-limit information on each of the user’s credit cards. Their balance-transfer page makes it easy to see where to transfer balances, and most importantly, the transfer can actually be made through Rate Surfer.

The software includes a suite of alerts via email and SMS. It aggregates the card info and can send an alert, for example, when aggregate balances exceed a certain point.

Finovate 2008 Inner8

image Next, we have Inner8 on stage with a demo from CEO Doug Doyle and Director of Product Sam Kasle.

Inner8 will be demo’ing an innovative approach for investing.

Inner8 is one of the youngest companies on stage, having launched the private beta just a few weeks ago. They call themselves the “match.com” of investing. They can match people to people, people to specific stocks, or even market conditions to specific stocks.

Finovate 2008 BoulevardR

image Next up is another alum of Finovate Startup, Matt Iverson, CEO of Boulevard R.

Boulevard R helps consumers with longer-term financial planning issues such as retirement planning.

Boulevard R helps users create a financial plan online using a 3-step process. The site allows users to work with a certified financial planner. They also have an integration with Advanta credit cards.

Users can go back and use the dashboard to see the plan they’ve produced and alter any of the inputs. They also have a “what if” key to run different planning scenarios.

Finovate 2008 Vidoop

image Next up is Mitchell Savage, EVP of Vidoop. Vidoop also appeared on stage at our Finovate Startup conference in April as Confident Technologies.

Vidoop provides solutions for login authentication and password management.

Vidoop showed an out-of-band authentication solution where during login the server calls the customer via telephone, and the user must either press # or, if preferred, enter a 4-digit PIN code to be authenticated via phone.

They also showed their visual approach, a “secret hidden in plain view,” in production at Charles Schwab.

Banks can use the system free-of-charge if they allow some of the visual images to contain product placements. On the demo, a Smart Car was shown as one of the visual image choices.

Finovate 2008 FiLife

image At the halfway point of the morning demo session, we have David Kansas, president of FiLife. FiLife makes its first Finovate appearance today.

FiLife is a joint venture between IAC and Dow Jones, now owned by News Corp. The company launched the personal finance website last year with a blog, and added personal financial management features in June 2008.

FiLife is making the first public presentation of its capabilities today at Finovate. The website allows users either to find other “smart users,” or to read advice and ask questions from “friendly gurus.”

What’s new
FiLife is introducing a series of product pickers, starting with credit cards. A unique visual display shows the different product choices. They also have attribute sliders, similar to Kayak, to narrow down the choices.

Kansas also demonstrated the “stacker” approach to helping users figure out how they stack up with their peers.

Finovate 2008 Sybase 365

image Next up is Sybase 365, with a demo from Cameron Franks, director of mCommerce America and Carroll Cucarola, technical account manager.

In its first appearance at Finovate, Sybase will show innovations from their mobile suite for banking and payments.

Sybase showed the broad capabilities of its mobile suite including the intelligent SMS capability that uses natural language syntax so users can determine the command to text a request to the bank, e.g., “what’s my balance” or “balance.”

Finovate 2008 CheckPoint

image The fourth presenter this morning is Jordy Berson, group product manager at Check Point Software Technologies.

Check Point is a new Finovate presenter and will demo its security solution for safer online banking.

Check Point is showing their ZoneAlarm ForceField, which, when installed on users’ machines, warns them if they go to a phishing site; even more important, it keeps malicious programs from being accidentally downloaded during Web surfing. It uses a virtual sandbox to protect Web sessions even if users’ machines already contain malicious software.

Finovate 2008 Wesabe

image The next presenter is Gabe Griego, VP marketing at Wesabe

Wesabe was the first online personal finance company to integrate social aspects into its service. The Silicon Valley company launched in late 2006 and appeared at Finovate Startup in April.

What’s new
Wesabe has added new graphing capabilities to easier compare your personal data with the community. You can also compare spending at individual merchants based on how the user has rated the merchant: fan vs. user vs. captive.