Christophe Langlois to live blog at FinovateStartup

Last October, I traveled to New York to cover the excellent first Finovate event organized by Jim Bruene from NetBanker and the Online Banking Report.
 
Jim and his team did an excellent job: twenty of the most innovative startups in the online finance space were presenting. I had a great day. I was extremely busy networking with the presenters and the attendees  as well as shooting 10 interviews with Mint, Prosper, LendingClub, Vancity, Yodlee, CheckFree, Huntington, Billeo, Jwaala and Geezeo.

In 2008, Jim and his team will organize 2 events: FinovateStartup on April 29th in San Francisco, and Finovate 2008 on October 9th in New York.

Live blogging from San Francisco
Jim and I kept in touch, and I am proud to announce that he invited me to be the guest blogger at FinovateStartup!
I will travel to San Francisco from the uk to blog live on NetBanker.

It is a unique opportunity to take part of one of the most exciting online finance conferences of the year. 

Special discount for the Visible Banking readers
I am glad to be able to offer you a special discount worth $100. Please note that this special offer is reserved to the first 5 readers to use the discount code "visiblebanking" during the registration process.

Come and meet with 40 of the most promising startups in online finance
Jim announced the final demo line up last week. The format of Jim's event is sharp and works very well: each company has only 5mn to demo its flagship product. Usually, the Founders of the companies themselves are on stage. They are passionate people, and I strongly recommend to attend the event if you have the chance.

 
Here’s the complete lineup by company type: 

• Checking/savings: Andera, First ROI, SmartyPig, 
• Financial shopping/comparison: Credit Karma, FindABetterBank, SmartHippo 
• Investing/asset management: Boulevard R., Cake Financial,
  CAPS (Motley Fool), SocialPicks, TradeKing, VaultStreet, Vestopia, Zecco 
• Lending/credit: Lending Club, Loanio, Prosper, SimpleTuition, Wonga 
• Mobile banking/payments: Aradiom, ClairMail, Diversinet, Tyfone 
• Personal financial management: Buxfer, Expensr, Jwaala, Mint, Wesabe 
• Security: Authentium, Guard ID, Guardian Analytics, TrustedID, Vidoop 
• Other: IP Commerce, Unified Money, WorkLight and four stealth startups 

It will give me the opportunity to catch up with the Founders I have interviewed last time, as well as a few companies I met in London: Authentium, Wonga and WorkLight.
 
I will stay in San Francisco from Saturday 26th April to Friday 2nd May. My goal is to meet as many innovative companies as possible and shoot short and insightful video interviews.

If you are a startup, a bank, or a major vendor in the online finance space, please do not hesitate to send me an email (cm_langlois[AT]yahoo[DOT]co[DOT]uk) to organize a meeting!
 
Related articles on Visible-Banking.com
* Coverage of Finovate 2007
* Interview John Sharp, CEO of Authentium

Finovate 07: interview with William Azaroff, Interactive Marketing & Channel Manager at Vancity

I first got in touch with William Azaroff a few months ago, via our blogs azaroff.com/blog and visible-banking.

William is the interactive marketing manager at Vancity, Canada's largest credit union. William has been blogging for over 4 years now. He is also a guest blogger on Jim Bruene's NetBanker.
 
I was extremely pleased to meet him at Finovate in New York. William covered the event in real time on NetBanker. I invite you to check William's posts on NetBanker.

William is very knowledgeable and passionate about Social Media, Online Communities and Web 2.0. He pioneered ChangeEverything.ca, the groundbreaking change-themed online community, which was named as an Offical Honoree at this year's Webby Awards

During our interview, we talked about blogging, user generated content, social networtking and the challenges faced by a bank or a credit union.

Interview with William Azaroff

 

Finovate 07: interview with Brandon McGee, VP & Senior Product Manager Mobile Banking at Huntington

Brandon first contacted me back in July 20007, when he started blogging about Mobile Banking. Brandon's blog is a great resource and if you share an interest in Mobile Banking I highly recommend you subscribe to his feed.

Brandon McGee is VP and Senior Product Manager at Huntington. He is also a guest blogger on Jim Bruene's Mobile Money & Banking.

Brandon covered the Finovate event on Jim's blog. After the conference, we spent a couple of minutes together. During the interview, Brandon shared his expertise and his vision on the US Mobile Banking market.

Interview with Brandon McGee

Finovate 07: interview with Andrew Taylor, CTO at Jwaala

Finovate's lineup of speakers was excellent and the personal finance space was well represented with companies such as Geezeo and Mint (both community -based) or Yodlee, CheckFree and Jwaala with their personal finance management tools for banks.

Andrew Taylor made a dynamic and compelling presentation. Jwaala's flagship product is MoneyTracker. It went live at Amplify CU in March 07.

MoneyTracker includes an account aggregation engine, an advanced natural search feature and you can easily turn any search into an automatic alert with the option of receiving the info via email, sms or even personal rss feed. Jwaala's rss feed is a real innovation in the financial services world.

During his presentation, Andrew insisted on the natural search feature which impressed the audience. It is extremely intuitive and it seems to work very well. Andrew also announced that Jwaala was now optimized for the iPhone screen.
Jwaala want to be known as an innovator: they took their rss initiative to the next level when they created the rss+OFX blog.

Interview with Andrew Taylor

Finovate 07: interview with Murali Subbarao, Founder & CEO of Billeo

I met Murali Subbarao, Founder & CEO of Billeo, at Finovate in October 2007 in New York City. Billeo provide three assistants online: the Bill Pay assistant, the Shopping assistant and the Password assistant.

In 2006, Billeo won two major distribution deals with target red card and Visa.com. Banks can brand Billeo's interface and provide them to their clients.

During his presentation, Murali insisted on the Bill Pay assistant, "online bill paymlents made easy", and the useful electronic filing cabinet.

Over 6,000 companies accept payments online. The Bill Pay assistant is a toolbar intergrated to your web browser. It lists all your payees and flags all your upcoming bills. It also provides a payment summary, displays the average payment amount and compare it to the other members'.

You can use the "fill the form" feature to automatically copy your personal information and pay the bill in seconds. All your personal information are encrypted, and stored locally on your computer.
You can easily store the transaction details, using the image capture feature, and then find them quickly with the advanced search feature provided by the electronic filing cabinet.

Interview with Murali Subbarao

Finovate 07: interview with Aaron Patzer, Founder & CEO of Mint.com

Mint is one of the hottest web 2.0 companies at the moment. After a couple of months of beta testing, they officially launched the service three weeks ago.

The timing was perfect, as they won the Techcrunch40 award in the US. The competition was tough with only 40 companies shortlisted out of 700 and only one winner. Well done Aaron, and well done to your team.

Like social lending, the personal finance space is crowded with players such as Wesabe, Mint, Geezeo, Buxfer, Billmonk...

My Finovate was extremely busy and productive, and meeting Aaron Patzer was great. During his presentation, Aaron introduced us to its award winning service. Mint's goal is to help its members save money. The only ads on the website are calculated to save you money. On average, they are claiming to be able to save you over $1,000 per year.

Mint connect with over 35,000 financial institutions and notify you by email or text alerts when you are about to go overdraft.
They also remind you the bills you have to pay today, and can tell you if you have overspent on a specific type of spendings (based on tag/category, like restaurants, hotels or drinks).
Contrary to other competitors, Mint is supposed to be 90% accurate when they automatically assign categories.

Interview with Aaron Patzer

 

Finovate 07: interview with Chris Larsen, Founder & CEO of Prosper

I first met Prosper back in March 2007 at the online_banking_summit_2007.

I was part of the panel on Web 2.0 with Rob Klapper, ex Chief Marketing Officer.

Prosper is one of the leading social lending marketplaces, with Zopa (in the UK): it is the first U.S. person-to-person lender, launched in Feb. 2006. Now, the social lending space is very busy and you can find a lot of competitors providing a similar online-community based service, usually focused on a country or territory.

I am glad I had the chance to spend a couple of minutes with Chris Larsen, Founder and CEO of Prosper. Chris is famous in the industry, he was previously the Chairman & Founder of E-Loan in the US.

During his speech at Finovate, Chris updated us on Prosper and gave us a few figures: 430,000 memberes, $91 million of loans, over 75,000 borrowers, over 168,000 loans listings, and an active community. This is an important trait of Prosper.

I believe web 2.0 companies's success will come from their ability to:
* leverage the existing technologies like blogging or social networking
* provide an intuitive platform to their members
* engage their members and urge them to create useful content and act as advocates for the brand

Prosper do that very well. You just have to check the impressive number of blogs dedicated to Prosper and Social Lending (cf my Social Lending blogroll)

New features
In the last couple of months, Prosper launched a Facebook application called Fantasy Banker.
During the conference, Chris announced a couple of new features. Prosper's goal is to extend the power of the community:
* now, they are leveraging the actual data from the Prosper marketplace
* soon, they will provide tools to help the members to bid more efficiently
* they will indicate when the ROI is too low, and they may point you to an ING Direct...
* the new portfolio plans will help you to diversify your investments based on the level of risk that suits you
* members will be able to post their own "community plans"

Interview with Chris Larsen

Finovate 07: interview with Peter Hazlehurst, SVP Product Management at Yodlee

I must admit that the first time I had ever heard of Yodlee, aka "the Account Aggregation company", was on Jim's NetBanker. Mainly because they haven't been targeting Europe so far. They are making good progress internationally though, in countries like India.

As far as I am concerned, Yodlee's presentation given by Peter HazleHurst, SVP Product Management, was one of the best ones at Finovate. Peter is a very good speaker: he knows the industry extremely well, and he has a good sense of humour.

Yodlee was known as the account aggregation company. But Peter and his colleagues have worked hard to change that perception of the company. Yodlee is a full-service financial tools provider.

Their clients are large US banks and credit unions, but they plan to target the small financial institutions soon with future large distribution deals.
The US is their core market, but they are focusing more and more on their international growth and the interface is now available in English, French, Spanish and Chinese. Peter just come back from a trip to France...

Their flagship product, the award winning MoneyCenter used by banks such as BoA, offer account opening, bill payment, funds transfer, personal finance management and long-term archives.

They leverage the web 2.0 "technologies" like AJAX to make people's lives easier and provide an intuitive interface. Their transaction journal and their financial calendar are two excellent examples of good usage of web 2.0.

Currenty, the registration rate for their personal finance management tool is one new user every 2 seconds; they currently have over 3 million users (October 2007).

Interview with Peter Hazlehurst

 

Finovate 07: interview with Patrick Gannon, SVP Lending at LendingClub

LendingClub is one of the leading players in the Social Lending space, with Zopa in the UK and of course Prosper in the US.

It was a pleasure to meet with John Donovan, COO, and Patrick Gannon, SVP Lending. Unfortunately, Renaud Laplanche, CEO and a fellow Frenchman, couldn't attend the event.

Another good example of how to leverage Facebook
There was a lot of buzz surrounding LendingClub when it launched because it was only available on Facebook. Now, you can also register on their website directly.
Their Facebook application became rapidly a success with over $1million of loans funded within the first 100 days. Like Geezeo, their application on Facebook enabled LendingClub to quickly reach a critical mass of users and leverage the trusted networks available on Facebook, and quickly increase its brand awareness and its profile in the industry.

John presented their exclusive Lending Match technology. He also insisted on the fact that all the info available, on credit history for instance, is anonymous.
 
Interview with Patrick Gannon

 

Finovate 07: interview with Bob Homer, VP Product Management at CheckFree

CheckFree has more or less created the mqrket for online bill payments in the US.

They processed 1 billion electronic payments last year. CheckFree recently bought another leader in the online banking space, Corillian.

Sourcemedia organized a webinar named Online Banking 2.0 back in March: I found extremely interesting the presentation from Max Janasik, Director of Product Management at Corillian.
I also had a good conversation with two people from CheckFree's electronic commerce division at the online_banking_summit_2007 where I was part of the panel on web 2.0.

I wasn't disappointed by the presentation at Finovate either. Milind Pandit, Director Product Management at CheckFree, did a good job insisting on how intuitive and how secure their service is.

In terms of security features, Milind showed the online login with challenge on mobile phone, their "progressive disclosure" technology, and the ability the customer has to configure his levels of security.

Interview with Bob Homer