Glenbrook’s Bryan Derman is live blogging from Finovate in New York City. This is only one of a series of posts featuring Bryan’s impressions as over sixty payments technology companies perform 7 minute demos (no PowerPoint slides allowed!) over two days. The index for Bryan’s Payments Views coverage is here.

I’ll be posting brief write-ups of each company presenting, in groups of nine.  Here’s the first batch:

Weemba

• Use social networking to help lenders and borrowers interact
• Professional lenders only; borrowers pay no fees
• Borrowers describe their project and can post a credit score
• Lenders do the active searching to find borrowers and projects they want
• Facilitates a direct and rich dialog between borrower and lender

demyst.data

• Help lenders and marketers learn more about customers through custom APIs
• Use phone, email, address to gather information about lists of prospects
• Up to 40 personal attributes:  Which social networks are they in?  What are their demographics?  What telecom carriers do they use and what sort of plan do they have?
• [Editorial comment] Scott McNealy was right – forget it, you have no privacy any more

Google

• Demoing “Google advisor” to help search for financial products
• Various controls and parameters that can narrow the search (e.g., I can only about interest rate; or I want to see banks with branches near my house)
• Trying to eliminate any “bait and switch” experiences with providers who list on Google advisor
• User can share contact info or request a call back – user can also use a proxy email address that will stop working after a period of time (a feature we always liked on Google Checkout)

Betterment (former Finovate Best in Show winner)

• Investor site based on adjusting asset allocation across broadly-diversified stock and bond funds rather than selling individual securities
• Now adding “goal-based investing” – a service where Betterment suggests an asset allocation appropriate for a particular objective (e.g., buy a house 3 years from now)
• They believe most investors underperform because they manage their money too actively – Betterment helps the investor follow the market with an appropriate risk/return tradeoff

Segmint

• Reviews transaction flow on behalf of banks to create profiles of “Key Lifestyle Indicators” (KLIs) about customer
• Can find customers that meet certain criteria that might make them good prospects for a particular product or campaign (e.g., new credit card for customers that do a lot of traveling)
• Goal is to make data immediately actionable

Kabbage

• Provides working capital to small online sellers
• Uses non-standard data to augment the underwriting (mostly social data like reviews from customers) – effectively crowdsourcing the credit decision
• Can fund a loan into a business’s PayPal account within 10 minutes
• Compiles results/reviews from various social networks (likes, tweets, etc.) and even compare them to those for similar businesses

RobotDough.com

• Equity research platform for individual investors
• Offers stock screeners to help select stocks to buy and now introducing an early warning alert system to help identify stocks that are undergoing significant changes in financial condition
• They have back-tested various changes in financials in order to predict the likely impact they will have on the stock price
• They cover 45,000 companies across more than 100 stock exchanges

Rebirth Financial

• Helping small businesses gain access to credit by connecting them directly to financial institutions
• Businesses fill out an application on Rebirth’s site and their platform runs a predictive model to produce a credit score for the business.  Lenders can use the score much as they would use credit ratings for a large public company
• The model rates the applicant against other companies in its industry
• They believe they can save community banks about $100 on the cost of screening loan applicants in order to decide which ones are deserving of detailed due diligence

Credit Sesame

• Online personal financial tool for responsibly managing loans and credit lines
• Applicants are verified and get a free credit score and an overall review of their financial condition.  They are then issued very levels of “member badges” that shows they are verified and actively managing their finances.
• Badges are private by default, but the applicant can choose to share them on social networks and other websites, allowing a person to effectively advertise their creditworthiness (e.g., a job applicant might use the badge to demonstrate their financial responsibility; a small seller on eBay or another commerce platform might want demonstrate their financial stability).