That set of mortarboards you might have noticed sailing through the air this week may have come from the celebrations of startups graduating from the VC Fintech Accelerator Empowered by FIS this week. The occasion was marked by the accelerator’s Demo Days Event during which all ten companies – two international startups and eight U.S.-based firms – presented their technologies before an audience of more than 350 investors and financial services professionals.

“These companies have demonstrated their capacity to bring world class solutions to solving problem and challenges in the FinTech space,” accelerator managing director, Wayne Miller said. Miller credited the companies for their proven ability to execute, “clearly validating their value proposition to enable banks to better serve their customers in the digital world.”

Among the ten companies in this year’s cohort was Finovate alum, Alpharank, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut this spring. The company leverages the kind of social graph technology successfully pioneered by Facebook – and effectively used by telecoms like Sprint to reduce customer churn – to help financial services get new customers and retain current ones. Alpharank was also among the companies earning special recognition from attendees. Quoted in Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, FIS VP Jack Novielli highlighted the company for its ability to provide key banks with key insights into their customers. “As banks become more pointed in their marketing who do they best market to,” he told the Democrat Gazette.  How does the bank spend its marketing dollar wiser?”

Alpharank was founded in San Francisco, California. The company won Best of Show for its live demonstration of its Customer Influence Mapping technology, which enables banks and credit unions to turn their historic transaction data into predictive social graph data. The company includes 500 Startups, Malcolm CasSelle, Payment Ventures, Right Side Capital Management, and Tony VanBrackle among its investors. Brian Ley is CEO.

The ten companies selected this year were the top selections from an applicant pool of 295 applications from the U.S. and 39 other countries around the world.Making the cut along with Alpharank were:

• Alto IRA
• Bond.AI
• eGiftify
• Hedgehog
• Omnetrium
• Plinqit
• Quotanda
• WalletFi
• Xplanr Analytics

Sponsored by Little Rock, Arkansas’ The Venture Center, the VC FinTech Accelerator provides a 12-week accelerator program for startups developing innovative technologies for the financial services industry. The program includes mentoring and training from financial services professionals from FIS and The Venture Center, as well as exposure to the program’s 30 financial institution partners. The Venture Center notes its member companies have created more than 445 jobs, more than $28 million in revenue, and raised $39 million in equity funding in the three years since its inception.

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