Who impressed the crowds at FinovateFall 2019?
It’s always interesting to dive into the Best of Show roster more deeply; not only does each individual winner have a compelling story to tell, the overall group of winners says a lot about the ecosystem as a whole. As a reminder, Finovate’s Best of Show awards are 100% decided by our audience, and the winning companies not only have amazing technology in their own right, but they also tell us a lot about what types of solutions are resonating among the industry.
In alphabetical order, the Best of Show winners at FinovateFall 2019 were:
It’s worth noting right out of the gate that only three of these companies are previous Finovate Best of Show winners (BlytzPay, Glia, and MX). It’s also worth noting that only MX, Glia, and ebankIT have been around for more than four years, making this one of the youngest pools of Best of Show winners that we’ve ever had.
MX took home their seventh Best of Show win with a demo with its platform that helps financial institutions and fintechs quickly and easily collect, enhance, analyze, present, and act on their financial data. Their inclusive offering is enabling innovation across the fintech spectrum by making it possible for fintechs to engage more quickly and more fruitfully with banks, making it a very popular demo across our entire audience.
Zogo Finance is working on increasing financial literacy among young people and helping banks connect with a new generation of potential customers. Founder Bolun Li, currently an undergrad at Duke, is the youngest person ever to win a Best of Show trophy at Finovate, and his demo had a ring of authenticity as he told a room full of older people that they’re not engaging with his generation effectively. College Aid Pro is also targeting high-schoolers and their families, helping prospective college students understand the financial implications of the college that they’ll attend and how much debt they’ll be incurring. Financial literacy (or the lack of it) among young people is increasingly popping up as an important theme in fintech, and it’s an area that’s starting to get more and more attention.
Engaging with customers more effectively to provide a better experience isn’t something that’s limited just to young people, of course. ebankIT won with a very impressive omnichannel engagement platform that anticipates customers’ needs and makes it easy for them to find solutions to the problems they’re facing. Pinkaloo seeks to connect with customers in a more emotional capacity by powering customers’ charitable giving. Through connecting with people over something they’re passionate about, Pinkaloo showed how they’re able to help financial institutions attract and retain customers.
The undisputed king of customer interaction (at least as far as the Finovate audience is concerned) remains Glia, who took home their seventh overall trophy for their work in digital engagement across platforms. In a fast-moving seven minutes on stage, the audience saw a customer interaction moving seamlessly across phone, chat, and web, that integrated both AI and human customer-service.
Moving away from the front-end of banking, we have two winners working in a more back-office capacity. owl.co eases the KYC and AML processes for banks, directly addressing one of the biggest pain points that financial institutions of all sizes experience. Cinchy takes the arduous process of collecting, cleaning, and managing data, and turns it into a visually pleasant, collaborative process that allows multiple parties to see and work with the same data in real time without having to worry about compromising the integrity of the data while it’s being used.
Finally, BlytzPay rounds out our FinovateFall Best of Show winners, with a payments product that allows any user to pay instantly, whether they prefer to use a card, check, or cash. While it’s nominally a payments platform, there is a significant financial inclusion angle as well, bringing people into the digital payment space who have so far been forced to sit on the sidelines.
While all worthy winners, Finovate events are about much more than the handful of companies who win Best of Show. Not all of our previous Best of Show winners have had the impact they would have liked in the industry, and many of the companies that slip under the audience’s radar go on to do great things. It is absolutely worthwhile to watch as many demo videos from FinovateFall as you can. The nine Best of Show winners are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the variety of solutions on display at Finovate’s flagship event, and there are a lot of other fascinating companies who weren’t quite able to crack into the top group. With so many diverse solutions coming from such a wide variety of sources, you ignore any of the solutions and technologies on display at your own peril.
Watch all the FinovateFall demos