Today’s top demos from Finovate Europe 2015

PaymentEye is reporting live from Finovate Europe, where 72 FinTech companies will demonstrate their most innovative products and services over just two days. Here are our top demos from Tuesday morning.

 

Streetshares

StreetShares, a peer-to-peer lending marketplace, uses social affinities and online auction technology to provide small businesses with loans at lower rates while providing investors with higher returns.

In order to do so, the platform “puts the peer back into peer-to-peer lending,” said CEO and co-founder Mark Rockefeller, by allowing small business owners to pitch their loan requests to both retail and institutional investors at one. These investors then compete in a Streetshare auction to fund the loans they like the look of, where the lowest rates charged to borrowers will win.

Streetshare also makes sure to invest in each successful loan request.

Streetshare demonstrated a new auto-invest option, which makes investments on retail or institutional investors’ behalf based on previously set parameters.

 

Encap security

2014 encap-logo-orange-nobackground“The password is a thing of the past, and the device is the thing of the future,” said Encap CEO Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen.

Encap demonstrated how financial institutions can use device specific authentication, like Apple’s Touch ID, to provide access to and authenticate high-value financial services transactions.

With a ‘one size fits no-one’ approach. Encap allows banking applications to pair their authentication procedure with the customer’s preferred device. With an iPhone 6, customers can use the device’s TouchID authentication to sign in to an online banking application, even when that application is being used on a computer or tablet. With an iPhone 5, Jørgensen demonstrated how a PIN authentication could work just as well.

Encap Security is trying to help banks scale their banking authentication, hoping to facilitate users adoption by making that authentication much easier.

Five Degrees

Five Degrees introduced Matrix Universe, a set of extensions on its Mid-Office services suite that enables banks to fully manage their payments partnership ecosystem.

The solution helps prepare banks for the world of API banking, and is built around the company’s BPM engine so that no coding is required to add alternative payment methods like PayPal, Ripple, and various wallets.

Instead, the company demonstrated how an alternative payment method like Ripple could be used to make a cheaper international money transfer from within a bank’s application, and how banks could simply drag Ripple in as a payment option using Matrix Universe.

Delta Bank

People are spending more and more time on social media, and many financial services companies are trying to find a way to use social media as a way of making transactions.

Delta Bank’s Pay2U allows users to send money instantly via Facebook or a mobile app. The user chooses the recipient of payment from their phone book or Facebook friends list, inputs their card details and the sum, then pushes “send money”. On the mobile app the recipient receives the SMS with the transfer security code and one-time password.

“People want to use their usual services,” said Delta Bank’s Stanislav Ostrovskyi, referring to social media and mobile devices. “We want to develop social channels into transactional ones.”

 

TiViTz

tivitz“Young people with savings are four times more likely to attend college,” said TiViTz CEO Siobhan Mullen. “It’s the largest indicator, even beyond family wealth.”

But the youth savings market needs some attention, and the TiViTz College $avings Game-a-thon is designed to do just that.

The Game-a-thon (where students solicit pledges online from friends and family for playing TiViTz games) is similar to a Walk-a-thon, only fully automated from pledge solicitation to fund deposit into a savings vehicle.

Children get a personalised pledge page, and can send pledges family and friends via email, social media and text. The pledge payment can then be deposited in a specified savings account for the child, funding existing customer accounts and encouraging the opening of new ones.

While obviously beneficial for the youth savings market, and making it more likely for more young people to be able to attend college, the solution is also a great marketing tool for banks.

Strands

Technology allows banks to be much more than creators of financial products. Strand’s Loop combines three solutions – business financial management, card-linked offers, and personal financial management – in a solution aimed at small businesses.

Strands demonstrated Loop from the perspective of a small London Italian restaurant chain, which was able to analyse which of its sites was losing revenue, and in what section of the day or week. The company was then able to set up an offer to address the problem, which could be picked up using the consumer-facing end of the solution.

 “With predefined marketing strategies and PFM data insights, SMEs can easily set up campaigns and target highly relevant deals to the card holders,” the company said.

 Stay tuned for more coverage live from Finovate Europe 2015.

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