Glenbrook’s Bryan Derman is live blogging from FinovateFall 2010. This is one of several posts; you can find an index to his coverage here.

Day Two starting up — several interesting companies on the agenda today…

Thwakk:

• Online 3D virtual world/game designed to facilitate customer acquisition
• Your Avatar makes a variety of financial decisions and gets a score that indicates how good the decision was
• Game administrator can also provide incentives for the Avatars in the game (e.g., extra points for certain behaviors, low rate credit cards), so that parents might reinforce certain lessons for their young adult children

Mortgagebot:

• Recently introduced PowerSite Mobile, a complement to their POS-based lending software
• This software powers 30 of the top 100 bank mortgage sites and 45 of the top 100 credit union mortgage sites
• Mortgagebot service is also available to consumers directly; they can do a simple search from among participating lenders on a mobile device with relatively streamlined data entry
• PowerSite responds with fully compliant information that would appear in a good faith estimate from a traditional lender
• A consumer that wishes to apply, enters his email address and gets an email with the estimate and a link to the lender’s computer-formatted PowerSite

Blaze Mobile:

• 5-year old start-up providing mobile payments and advertising
• Payment uses a contactless sticker on the phone, tied to a card or deposit account. A confirmation message is sent to the user’s mobile phone (and can be posted to a Facebook page)
• Accounts stored in the Blaze Mobile wallet can also be used to purchase digital content on the phone (e.g., movie tickets, which are also store in the wallet)
• The wallet can also store and update various loyalty/rewards accounts, and it periodically serves up clickable rewards

Dynamics:

• Working to bring innovation to a magnetic stripe POS environment that hasn’t changed much in years and is rather inflexible
• Dynamics provides “Card 2.0” technology that makes the mag stripe dynamic on the card
• The card contains computer circuitry and a battery, yet conforms to existing size/thickness standards for credit and debit cards
• Multi-Account Card — a single card that can support two or more accounts; cardholder selects the account to be used by pressing a button on the card
• Hidden Card — Card contains a screen that hides part of the card number until the card is unlocked by entering a code using buttons on the card
• Loyalty Card — Partnering with Citi on two rewards cards that can be used to either make a credit purchase or pay instantly at POS with rewards points (“Citi 2G cards”).  These cards have been in pilot for some time and will be opening up shortly

Ixaris:

• Opn platform that provides access to various payment networks for developers
• Provides reusable elements called “Paylets” that easily provide certain payment use cases — P2P, branded card programs, global B2B payments, and pooled payments
• One customer used Opn to manage fraud on cross-border card transactions by easily providing a one-time card number solution that allowed fraud to managed in the buyer’s country (using Ixaris’s “Virtual Card Paylet”)

Plantly:

• Investment advice service (still in beta) that focuses on helping the user understand risk
• System uses four questions to narrow down a broad range of investment options and illustrates the potential returns based on the riskiness of a portfolio
• They are broker-agnostic, but they do show how brokerage fees will affect investment returns

ClairMail:

• Provider of mobile banking applications to banks
• They provide the “triple play” — mobile banking apps accessible via SMS, mobile browser, or on-deck apps for smartphones
• Now incorporating remote deposit capture into their mobile apps
• Also taking advantage of the “always on” quality of mobile to address issues like fraud management and customer relationship expansion
• Suspicious transactions can be referred to the customer’s mobile device for additional approval (or rejection)
• Can also use alerts to serve context-specific marketing messages within the app (e.g., enroll for overdraft line of credit instead of experiencing an overdraft)
• Can even work with feature phones using the SMS channel