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.

Cartera Commerce

• Specialize in merchant funded rewards linked to cards (merged with Vesdia); now entering the local deals space in 13 MSAs
• Support a merchant portal through which a merchant can create for a card-linked offer that will be pushed to Cartera’s partner banks (can also be white labeled by a bank to its local small business customers)
• Offers can be placed into online banking statements for relevant prospects and are also listed in an offer portal branded by the bank and made available to all consumers
• Redemption occurs automatically when the consumer uses the linked card. The consumer gets a confirming email (showing additional offers) and the rebate is deposited into the consumer’s account
• Merchants get monthly reporting on usage to show the effectiveness of the campaigns

FamZoo.com

• Financial education site targeted at children that provides a “fake bank”
• Site allows parents to track both kids’ financial transactions and other behaviors/chores that might affect their finances (e.g., made bed, emptied dishwasher)
• The partner edition of FamZoo can be co-branded and delivered by a bank in order to help educate children on financial matters.  The bank can also deliver targeted advertising (e.g., teen debit card)

oFlows

• Historically focused on paperless account opening/application technology
• Now turning to tablet apps for a broader range of functions (e.g., site reviews for construction loan disbursements)
• Files can include not just paperless forms, but also pictures of other forms, photos of a project, etc.
• Also working in credit, collections, customer service and other areas beyond account origination

InComm & CorFire

• Demoing a mobile app for gifting value and driving merchant loyalty
• Consumer can take a merchant offer and gift it to a friend who will be prompted to download the merchant’s app (which contains the offer in the form of a virtual merchant gift card, which can be personalized with photos)
• InComm has deep integration to the merchant POS, so the offer value will be deducted from the sale price before the customer pays

planwise

• Deploying a very simple and uncluttered site where consumers can analyze their plans for major purchases and life events (e.g., buying a home, having kids, etc.)
• Site utilizes real-time active graphics that are created as the user enters data
• Planwise asks the user to select from a range of potential events that may occur in the near term or longer term
• The site contains drill downs that use the user’s own data to illustrate concepts (e.g., How much equity do I have in my home?)
• Planwise layers together different plans or events to show how they will affect the consumer’s overall financial position
• Also facilitates limited, secure sharing of plan data

Jingit

• Payment platform that facilitates money exchange for various kinds of customer engagements
• Payments are made (e.g., from an advertiser to a consumer) via an online Jingit account or onto a Visa prepaid card
• Jingit facilitates targeting of the merchant offers
• Jingit also instantly converts offer-based payments into cash value for the Jingit consumer

Lighter Capital

• “Entrepreneurs funding entrepreneurs”
• Attempting to bring the typical coffee house meeting between startups and financiers and bring it online
• The site tracks the entrepreneur’s progress against Lighter Capital’s pre-determined funding criteria.  Some of the criteria are financial, but also include the quality of the team and their reputations on social networks (in effect, online reference checking)
• Also look at activity on social networks; ultimately a human makes the funding decision

MasterCard

• InControl feature allows cardholders to control spending on their cards (when, where, how much, etc.)
• Small business can go online at their card issuer and configure individual spending controls for cards held by several employees
• Can also generate virtual cards for very limited purposes and the security of not sharing a card number tied directly to an ongoing account
• Configuration and management can also be done on the mobile channel

BankSimple

• Crafts a banking user experience designed for speed by overlaying technology on the products of several bank partners
• Online site produces a future-focused view of the consumer’s balance, accounting for pending transactions and future commitments
• They believe many banking questions go unanswered resulting in confusion about money
• BankSimple works on cleaning and categorization so that customers can do natura language searches in order to track their activity
• Provides “goal” functionality to facilitate savings and find appropriate account vehicles
• Designed mobile app before designing online experience