How they describe themselves: Founded in 1998, Affinity Solutions manages hundreds of offline and online relationship marketing and retailer-based rewards and incentives programs. Affinity leverages proprietary analytics applied to a range of customer data in a privacy-controlled environment to deliver the right offers most likely to drive desirable customer behavior for its bank and retailer partners. Affinity has partnerships with over 4,000 national and regional banks and leading processors, including Sovereign Bank, First Data, and Capital One, as well as over 25,000 retail partners. Its innovative programs also incorporate experiential benefits and editorial content that ‘delight and entertain customers before, during and after they shop,’ to drive deeper customer relationships for their partners.

How they describe their product/innovation: Coupon-on-a-Card is a patent-pending product allowing consumers to either pre-purchase or opt-in to a retailer offer and then receive the discount at the Point-of-Sale through the credit card swipe, not in a statement credit, but in Real-Time.

Retailers will be able to use Affinity’s “proprietary” segmentation strategies to create a marketing campaign and Banks will be able to deliver the offer totally through the plastic, with no need to deal with paying up-front and receiving a statement credit later.

The receipt will show the split-tender transaction, only charging the credit/debit card for the final amount due, after the discount/offer is applied.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev.: Charles Rosenblatt, EVP Partnerships, [email protected],
917-484-0398
Press: Laura Baer, SVP Marketing, [email protected]
Sales: Jonathan Gagliano, EVP Bank Sales, [email protected], 205-592-6593,
Wendy Norman, EVP Retailer Sales, [email protected], 646-922-0573

How they describe themselves: Applause Learning brings a new approach to education. With an emphasis on game-based learning, player interaction, cooperation, and exploration, our products provide a mixture of education and entertainment that is both unique and rewarding. Although the majority of our current applications are created for children ages 6 – 12, we are currently developing new products for both teens and toddlers. Our flagship program, the Coindexter Club, has been well-received in both the education and banking industries, and we hope to expand our audience in 2012 with new financial literacy product offerings developed for elementary, middle, and high school students.

How they describe their product/innovation: The Coindexter Club is a financial literacy program for children ages 6-12 that includes many dynamic features. The program can be licensed by financial institutions or accessed directly by parents through our simple online subscription process. The foundation of the Coindexter Club is the virtual city of Econopolis found at www.Coindexter.com. Econopolis is a game-based virtual world that teaches children how to earn, save, spend, and invest money. The autonomous, non-linear learning environment of Econopolis allows children to learn at their own pace and develop strong financial behaviors that translate seamlessly from the virtual to the real world.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev., Press & Sales: Adrian Lawrence, Creative Director, [email protected], office: 678-376-1601, cell: 404-405-1797

How they describe themselves: Balance Street is the premier direct marketplace between consumers and creditors for the purpose of debt settlement. We provide consumers with the opportunity to relieve their debt burden without fees. Through Balance Street, consumers can negotiate with their creditors directly, allowing them to avoid debt settlement companies who charge exorbitant fees (up to 20% of total debt owed) to perform basic “automatable” tasks. This means Balance Street frees up about 20% of market inefficiencies created by debt settlement middlemen, providing a better financial outcome for consumers and creditors. Our consumer debt transaction engine will create efficiencies, data and consumer behavior metrics never seen before by the consumer debt industry. With over $785 billion of credit card debt in the U.S., Balance Street will revolutionize the way debt is settled.

How they describe their product/innovation: Balance Street shows consumers how much their debt costs them (as well as the high costs of debt settlement companies), then provides an easy way for them to enter delinquent credit card debt, save money for settlement, and make, accept, and counter offers from creditors. It’s a free, secure and easy way for consumers to settle delinquent debt that also provides creditors with critical information to help them recover more debt faster. Creditors can also benefit from making large lump sum settlements with blocks of consumers, saving millions in customer service, mail, fax, email and money transfer costs. Furthermore, Balance Street will introduce and sell diverse metrics to the credit industry, derived from the unique transaction engine it built to help struggling consumers and overburdened creditors.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev.: Johnny Simon, Founder, 562-883-0390
Press: Suzanne Coleman, VP Operations, 619-206-2784
Sales: Michael Lees, VP Corporate Development, 310-383-4841

How they describe themselves: BancBox is an infrastructure platform that helps companies build payment services into their web and mobile applications. Based on a simple API-driven approach that allows customers to maintain control of their user experience, BancBox delivers a secure, compliant and integrated way for clients to Collect, Store and Send money from within their applications. BancBox also offers a unique service that assists clients in addressing the regulatory complexities of moving money in compliance with state money transmitter laws. A trusted expert with years of payment operations experience, BancBox has opened over a hundred thousand consumer accounts and processed billions of dollars in payments.

How they describe their product/innovation: We’ve integrated with banks so our clients don’t have to. With an out-of-the-box set of APIs that cover the entire money movement flow, BancBox customers can integrate payment services in just a few days rather than months and can leverage the platform to scale and adapt to new requirements as needed.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev.: Sanj Goyle, [email protected]
Press: Lynne Cox, [email protected]
Sales: Chris Akin, [email protected]

How they describe themselves: Airline pilots train in flight simulators, known to be one of the most effective training methods. After the financial crisis, isn’t it about time we ensure our bank risk managers also have access to the best training methods? We hope to have a broad impact which “moves the needle” of the skill sets and strength of bankers globally. We have a suite of products to roll out covering the spectrum of the retail banking skill sets, starting with CreditLab for credit risk management. In the future, bankers will be able to certify their skill sets through successful completion of the most difficult levels of simulation games.

How they describe their product/innovation: CreditLab is simulation gaming for retail bank risk managers. The launch Web App product supports team competition in a facilitated learning environment and when offered as an institutional license, future versions will support multiplayer online competition and individual seat license. Is it e-learning? Thankfully, no. Is it angry birds for bankers? Regrettably, no. It is engaging, but designed to reinforce important skills and technical concepts. That’s right – flight simulators for bankers! CreditLab focuses on credit risk management skills, pitting teams against each other to make tough choices and tradeoffs with their portfolios.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev. & Press: Michelle Katics, CEO, [email protected]
Sales: David Anderson, North America Sales, [email protected], 302-743-7359
International: Rod Jahner, VP Business Development, [email protected], 919-435-7580

How they describe themselves: Bazaarvoice is the leading provider of social commerce solutions that help our clients capture, display and analyze online word of mouth, including consumer-generated ratings and reviews, questions and answers, story campaigns, recommendations, photographs, videos and other content about our clients’ brands, products or services. Bazaarvoice, which literally means “voice of the marketplace,” was founded on the premise that online word of mouth is critical to consumers and businesses because of its influence on purchasing decisions, both online and offline. We enable our clients to place consumers at the center of their business strategies with conversations that generate and share sentiment, preferences and other information about brands, products or services.  Through our technology platform, our clients leverage online word of mouth to increase sales, acquire new customers, improve marketing effectiveness, enhance consumer engagement across channels, and improve existing products and services.

How they describe their product/innovation: Bazaarvoice Conversations is a SaaS solution that allows highly regulated brands to safely capture, moderate, analyze, and display authentic customer word of mouth in digital and mobile experiences. BV Conversations helps brands propagate a multidimensional social experience resulting in higher sales and customer satisfaction while gathering powerful insights and intelligence. With the Conversations platform, brands can capture customer word of mouth content from virtually anywhere and display it in numerous places including websites, branded communities, social extensions, mobile and tablet applications, and display ads using our syndication and media solutions.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev.: Mark Piening, VP of Business Development, [email protected],
512-551-6733
Press: Emily Brady, [email protected], 650-692-6107
Sales: Greg Brown, VP of Sales for North America, [email protected],
512-551-6325

How they describe themselves: BehavioSec, a Swedish security startup, does behavioral biometrics in an interesting transparent way.

Their web & mobile offering can enhance traditional username/password/PIN based authentication, bringing the security to a new level without compromising user experience, privacy concerns, or adding complex & expensive hardware.

How they describe their product/innovation: BehavioSec is showing the answer to the mobile security problem at Finovate.

It’s no longer sufficient to enter the correct PIN code or pattern; it has to be entered in the correct way.

BehavioMobile adds a layer of behavioral analytics to a financial app (such as a banking application), making sure it can only be accessed by a typing or swiping sequence that is uniquely connected to that person’s biometrics.

Anyone attempting to access the app has to use the correct pressure, velocity, and acceleration, and they must combine this with the correct sequence speed & key-flight before they can access it.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev., Press & Sales: Olov Renberg, CEO, [email protected]

How they describe themselves: Bill.com is a Cash Flow Command and Control™ System that manages accounts payables and receivables for businesses of all sizes. Offering online bill pay, custom invoicing services, unlimited document storage, collaboration tools, and mobile access, Bill.com’s services easily sync to users’ accounting software programs and online bank accounts to better control company financials. Bill.com guards against errors and employs enterprise-class fraud protections that current methods cannot match. More than 100,000 users are now paying millions of bills worth billions of dollars using Bill.com. Now, Bill.com offers a complete banking platform that will make your bank the core of your customer’s business.

How they describe their product/innovation: Bill.com’s complete banking platform utilizes CashView to give your business customers command and control over their cash flow, payables and receivables. In addition to creating significant new revenue streams for your bank, resulting in deeper relationships with your bank’s most valuable customers, the Bill.com award-winning platform delivers the other 90% of the business cash flow management process to your bank making it the hub of your customers’ financial operations. Bill.com also just happens to be one of the most highly awarded, widely praised financial applications to come along in years.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev. & Sales: 1-877-345-2455
Press: AlexaRae Antekeier, [email protected], 415-249-6778

How they describe themselves: BillGuard Inc. is the world’s first online bill monitoring and resolution management provider, serving consumers and the financial services community.  Through patent-pending big-data analytics and advanced crowdsourcing techniques, BillGuard alerts debit and credit cardholders to deceptive, erroneous and unauthorized charges and facilitates both in-statement P2P knowledge sharing and direct-to-merchant online resolution. BillGuard has been featured prominently in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and The Economist as well as on ABC News and CBS News.  The company was recognized by TechCrunch as the 2011 Top New Startup Runner-up worldwide and was most recently inducted into the Online Banking Report Hall of Fame as one of the top online banking innovations of all time.

How they describe their product/innovation: BillGuard FI™ brings BillGuard’s award winning 24/7 bill monitoring, in-statement P2P knowledge sharing and direct-to-merchant resolution to online banking. Card issuers seamlessly integrate BillGuard FI™ to generate new value-add service revenue and lower inquiry and dispute processing costs.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev. & Sales: Justin Bonar, VP Sales & BD, [email protected]
Press: Tracey Sheehy, [email protected]

How they describe themselves: Cachet Financial Solutions is a leading provider of remote deposit capture (RDC) solutions for financial institutions and service organizations. With our industry-leading platform, Cachet has simplified the process for delivering, implementing and servicing RDC. Cachet offers commercial and consumer solutions for Mac, PC, and Mobile, providing our clients and their customers greater flexibility and freedom.

How they describe their product/innovation: Select Business on a tablet provides greater freedom to busy business executives and managers who need to keep track of the company’s deposit records, but can’t be at their desks. Users with proper security would have the ability to track every action performed on the system, by date and user, create and run reports, and export data to PDF and other formats for viewing. In addition to all the Select Business features, we will also be adding the ability to submit checks for deposit through the tablets themselves for tablets with cameras.

Contacts:

Press: Manon Ibes, Marketing Coordinator, [email protected]
Sales: Joe Greco, Director of Business Development, [email protected]

How they describe themselves: Cardlytics’ unique advertising platform enables banks to deliver rich, relevant rewards to its customers based on purchasing history while fully protecting their privacy. The platform is entirely merchant-funded with advertisers targeting consumers based on spending patterns: where, how much and how frequently they spend at a store and in the broader retail category.

How they describe their product/innovation: Cardlytics will be demonstrating the impact of showing merchants how and where their revenues are being generated on a geographical representation.

Contacts:

Sales: David Torgerson, SVP, Financial Institution Sales, [email protected]
Marketing: Rod Witmond, SVP, Marketing, [email protected]
UK Office: Jason Brooks, Managing Director

How they describe themselves: At Clover, we’ve assembled an exceptional team hailing from Silicon Valley’s most successful consumer internet companies and the world’s leading universities who are determined to make the checkout process incredible.

How they describe their product/innovation: Clover empowers payment processors and value added resellers to provide merchants with the best customer checkout experiences.

Contacts:

Bus. Dev. & Sales: Mark Schulze, VP of Business Development, [email protected]
Press: Leonard Speiser, Co-President and VP of Product, [email protected]