If you've been reading NetBanker for the past few months, you've heard about our upcoming conference, FinovateStartup: Demo'ing the Future of Finance.

Reminder: It's Tuesday, April 29, at the UCSF Mission Bay campus just south of downtown San Francisco (previous coverage here). It's an offshoot of our first Finovate conference (videos here) held last fall in New York City (note 1).

Forty startups will demo their latest and greatest (note 2) on the big screen. There will be several industry debuts, a handful of a new product launches, and hundreds of new twists unveiled that day. 

While coverage by more than two dozen press, analysts, and bloggers at the event should provide a good overview of what's going on, there is nothing like being there (note 3). Imagine talking to 10, 20, or 30 founders and senior execs in a single day. It will make your head spin, but by the time you get back to the office, you will have been exposed to a year's worth of new ideas. The value = priceless. 

Notes:
1. We return to New York on Oct 14 for the second annual Finovate conference. It's the Tuesday after Columbus Day, so if you want to make a long weekend out of it, you might want to book hotel space now. It's a lot more than San Francisco (see #3), but it will only get worse. And you can lock in super-early-bird prices by registering for the conference today. Because it's NYC, seating is limited, so don't put it off too long. We sold out in about six weeks last year.

2. Unfortunately, Lending Club will not be able to present at FinovateStartup due to the quiet period as they register to sell securities (see coverage here). We have several companies looking to take their place, so we still expect to have 40 demos.

3. It must be a relatively slow week in downtown San Francisco, as hotel rooms are as cheap as we've seen them in years. We have 5 rooms at the Parc55, averaging about $130 per night plus tax. The average daytime high is 65 that time of year, so come out for the weekend and enjoy the Bay Area in spring.

It will be interesting to look back at this post five years from now and see how many of the 40 startups presenting at our first annual FinovateStartup conference are thriving, holding on, or have moved on.

I know one thing for sure, there will be five years' worth of innovative ideas served up on April 29. I am really looking forward to it. If you can make time in your busy spring schedule, I hope you'll consider attending. You can still save a hundred bucks by registering here by Monday, March 31.

The press release follows.

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Online Banking Report Announces Final Demo Lineup for
FinovateStartup Conference

28 March 2008

Seattle, WA: Times may be tight in the credit markets, but the financial services technology area is still hopping with startups. Forty of the most promising will gather in San Francisco April 29 to prove to an auditorium filled with bankers, VCs, tech gurus, and the press what makes each the next big thing in finance.

No slides. No speeches. No wasted time. Finovate serves up 100% demos with plenty of networking time to speak with start-up founders and execs.

The main threads will be online personal finance (5 startups), online savings/checking (3 startups), social finance/investing (7 startups), lending/credit (5 startups including 3 person-to-person lenders), comparison shopping for financial services (3 startups), security (6 startups), and mobile banking/payments (4 startups).

Several stealth companies plan to launch at the conference, and a number of startups will be introducing significant product improvements or new services. We expect to see plenty of Web 2.0, including social-media-inspired investing, widgets and Facebook apps, and next-generation financial search. It will be an amazing day.

Here’s the complete lineup by company type:

• Checking/savings: Andera, First ROI, SmartyPig
• Financial shopping/comparison: Credit Karma, FindABetterBank, SmartHippo, SimpleTuition
• Investing/asset management: Boulevard R., Cake Financial,
  CAPS (Motley Fool), SocialPicks, TradeKing, Vestopia, Zecco
• Lending/credit: Lending Club, Loanio, Prosper, Wonga
• Mobile banking/payments: Aradiom, ClairMail, Diversinet, Tyfone
• Personal financial management: Buxfer, Expensr, Jwaala, Mint, Wesabe
• Security: Authentium, Guard ID, Guardian Analytics, TrustedID, VaultStreet, Vidoop
• Other: IP Commerce, Unified Money, WorkLight and four stealth startups 

About FinovateStartup Conference

• Date: April 29, 2008
• Place: San Francisco, CA (UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center)
• Cost: $995
• Agenda: 20 demos in the morning, 20 in the afternoon; each session followed by two hours of networking to meet with the presenters in one-on-one discussions
• Website: finovatestartup.com
• For more information on last fall’s sold-out NYC event, see netbanker.com/finovate

Note: Members of the media should contact Jim Bruene, jim@netbanker.com to secure a press pass.

About Online Banking Report
Founded in 1995 by former banker Jim Bruene, Online Banking Report provides in-depth analysis, relevant data, and informed recommendations to financial services executives in 50 countries. Online Banking Report is published by Online Financial Innovations, a Seattle-based research company. For more information and free sample reports, visit onlinefinancialinnovations.com, email info@netbanker.com or call (206) 517-5021. You may also find OFI's blog on the latest in online finance & banking at netbanker.com.

If you've wondered why the NetBanker blogging machine has slowed down, it's not because we've wilted in the summertime heat. No, it's because we've been putting together a scorching hot conference, our first ever! I can't begin to tell you how much fun we've had negotiating for a NYC venue, finding a top-notch A/V crew, and building a website on short notice!

But it will all pay off on Oct. 2 when twenty of the most innovative companies in the financial, banking and lending industries gather in New York City to offer a glimpse of the future of online and mobile banking at FINOVATE 2007: DEMOing the Future of Financial Services.

Following the popular format pioneered by DEMO, FINOVATE 2007 will provide companies with a mere seven minutes to “wow!” an audience of 200 leading executives, investors, analysts, members of the press and bloggers with actual demonstrations of their latest & greatest products and services (no powerpoint allowed!). The demos will be followed by intimate networking sessions where attendees will be granted unprecedented access to these innovative companies and their executives.

The presenter list includes (in alphabetical order): Andera, Billeo Inc, CheckFree, ClairMail, Firethorn, Geezeo, Digital Insight (an Intuit company), Identity Theft 911, iPay Technologies, Jwaala, Lending Club, Metavante, mFoundry, Mint, Monitise, MortgageBot, MShift, Online Resources, Prosper Marketplace, and Yodlee.

General admission tickets for the event are extremely limited (there are less than 100 left!). And with only 47 shopping days left, get yours today and qualify for the early-bird rate of under $500. To register, visit our registration page at finovate.com or call us at +1 (206) 517-5021. Don’t miss out on your chance to see what’s next in P2P lending, online account opening, bill payments, mobile banking, social personal finance and more!

(Member of the press or industry blogger? Email us at finovate@netbanker.com to request a press pass.)

Tomorrow, the most unusual conference in the banking industry, BarCamp Bank kicks off at 9 AM in Seattle's Pioneer Square historical district. It costs approximately 1/50th of a normal conference ($35) and has no set speakers, agenda, or sales pitches. It's just an excuse for a bunch of creative types to get together and talk about the future of money and banking. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Thanks again to Jessie Robbins for organizing the event. If you can make it to Seattle tomorrow or Sunday, you can still sign up here.  

The first thing we'll do tomorrow is brainstorm topics for group discussion. Here's my short(ish) list: 

• Outside the box: If you were to design a financial institution from scratch, disregarding all current regulatory constraints, what would it look like?  
• Alt delivery: Is online account access already old-fashioned? Do customers really want to log in to their bank multiple times each week or is there an easier and less intrusive way to keep consumers abreast of their financial lives?
• Social networks: Will social networks such as Facebook spawn their own virtual credit unions to serve the financial needs of members? Or will existing financial instructions step in to serve the need?
• Mobile finance: Mobile banking and payments are on their second trip up the hype curve. Is it real this time? If so, will mobile services be extensions of existing solutions, replacements for them, or an entirely new type of service?  
• Security: Financial security and privacy concerns remain top-of-mind with consumers. What role should financial institutions take in education, prevention, and resolution?
• Opensource marketing: With 15,000 financial institutions in the United States alone and most of them setting up shop online, it's absurd to think that your customers aren't looking around for the best prices. Why not follow the Progressive Auto Insurance model and actually enable price searches from your site?

I'll do my best to let you know what we come up with.  

Being somewhat older than the 20-something coders the frequent the Silicon Valley/Toronto/Paris/Austin BarCamp scene (Wikipedia definition, website), I'm not quite sure what to expect when the banking version, BarCamp Bank, comes to Seattle next weekend (July 21/22).

But simply knowing that the Trabian gurus, Brent Dixon and Trey Reeme, will be in attendance assures that it will be eye-opening and fun. There's also the king of banking social media, Ed Terpening of Wells Fargo as well as William Azaroff, Pierre Burns, and Monica Mashal from pioneering Vancity and Ben Morales the creative thinker behind many cool initiatives at Washington State Employees Credit Union. And so far, just one representative from the hot personal finance space, Marc Hedlund from Wesabe (here's the full registration list so far).

The idea is to gather a bunch of innovative thinkers in one spot, drink coffee, eat pizza and try to change the world, one payment at a time. All in one weekend.

It's beautiful in Seattle this time of year, if you can make it, drop your $35 into this form ASAP and I'll see you next week. Otherwise, we'll be writing about it of course.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in today to the American Bankers Association webinar on website design. And for those of you on the call, please let me know what you thought of the presentations either by private email, or via the comments below. It's the first time I've been involved in a 2-hour Webinar, and I'm curious about the experience from the listener's perspective.

The ABA's Doug Johnson pulled together the following panel and served as master of ceremonies: 

This session was a Web-based version of the session we gave in Palm Springs earlier this year (coverage here). My 20-minute presentation included examples from some favorite financial websites. Here are the links:

Overall Bank/Web 2.0 Design
1. Buxfer buxfer.com: Web 2.0 design/functionality (A-)
2. Wesabe wesabe.com: Quicken meets Zagat (A-)
3. Billq mybillq.com: Award-winning bill payment tracker (A)
4. Prosper prosper.com: Before and After shots of its recent web redesign, nice job reducing clutter, (A-)

Homepage Focus
5. Wachovia wachovia.com: Not-so-great design, and way too cluttered (C+)
6. Google google.com: Legendary focus on what matters (A++)
7. Bank of America bankofamerica.com: Good design, but still too much clutter (A-)
8. ING Direct ingdirect.com: Great design, no clutter (A)

Sales
9. Attention: U.K. montage: smile.co.uk, egg.co.uk, alliance-leicester.co.uk
10. Interest: E*Trade Bank etradebank.com: Great at selling key products (A)
11. Desire: High-yield savings montage: emigrantdirect.com (A), hsbcdirect.com (A), mybankingdirect.com (A)
12. Desire: Progressive Insurance progressive.com: Great comparisons to competition using scrolling summary of other users' search results (A-)
13. Action: NextCard: No longer online (A+)

Customer Interaction/Satisfaction
14. Wells Fargo blogs blog.wellsfargo.com: Look especially at the StudentLoanDown (A), which demonstrates how to communicate with a Web-savvy niche audience
15. UW Credit Union RSS feeds uwcu.org/rss: One of the first, if not THE first, U.S. financial institution to offer RSS feeds of its Web-based. The CU has also added RSS auto-discover technology as seen in the address box (screenshot below)

Here's the latest calendar of events of interest to the online banking community. I'll be speaking and/or attending the highlighted events. Drop me an email if you want to try to get together at any of them.

I attended the public portion of the 2-day Mobile Payment Forum Spring Member Meeting in San Diego yesterday <mobilepaymentforum.org>. The group was formed by MasterCard, Visa, American Express and JCB more than five years ago to help develop standards and promote best practices in mobile payments.

The current board of directors:

• Simon Pugh, VP Standards & Infrastructure, MasterCard 
• Stephanie Ericksen, VP Product Technology & Integration, Visa
• Martin Harrison, Head of Sales and Strategy, First Data
• Christopher J. Bierbaum, Product Development, Emerging Products Group, Sprint
• Bob Adamany, VeriSign
• Oliver Kelly, Vodafone

It was a pay-to-present day, with each sponsor allotted time based on the size of their financial contribution. Six gold sponsors spoke for 30 minutes, a silver sponsor was allotted 15 minutes, and the only platinum one was handed the podium for a full hour. Consultant Richard Crone of Crone Consulting gave the keynote and handled the introductions and wrap-up.  

Platinum Sponsor:
ClairMail: Joseph Salesky, CEO

Gold Sponsors:
Firethorn Mobile: Tripp Rackley, CEO
PayCash Mobile (Cyphermint): CEO, Joseph Barboza
eBizMobility: CEO, Jeremy Kagan
Erico: VP Marketing, Larry Loper
mFoundry: VP Product, John Pizzi

Silver Sponsor:
Sapphire Mobile Systems: Rick Rasansky, CEO

For the most part, the speakers did a commendable job keeping things informative and not heading straight to sales-pitch mode (see note 1). The highlight was Firethorn CEO Tripp Rackley and ClairMail CEO making impassioned pitches on opposite sides of the SMS banking (ClairMail) vs. downloaded app (Firethorn) continuum (note 2). And as usual, Richard Crone of Crone Consulting set the stage with an entertaining and fact-filled keynote (note 3). 

Despite being a payments forum, most of the talk centered around online banking (Firethorn, ClairMail, mFoundry, Sapphire), mobile advertising (Erico), and ecommerce (eBizMobility). Only PayCash Mobile and keynoter Richard Crone spent more than a few minutes on payments. 

The main reason: Mobile banking is on the verge of breaking out, and banks are reaching for their checkbooks. With far more infrastructure hurdles, cellphone-based payments will lag mobile banking adoption by five years (see forecast in our most-recent Online Banking Report, 138/139).

I'll post a few more items from the conference during the next few days.

Note:

1. Hint for conference attendees: Always look for private-company CEO presentations. Private-company CEOs usually do a great job speaking about the broader issues, understanding that their industry knowledge is a far better sales pitch for their organization than a dozen "About us" slides. Marketing VPs on the other hand, seem enamored with how many times they can work their company and client names into the presentation deck. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of many public-company CEOs who are so ham-strung by disclosure regulations, they can hardly say anything that's not already widely known.  

2. For more on the mobile banking debate, see our latest Online Banking Report, "Mobile Banking & Payments" (OBR 138/139 here).

3. Disclosure: Mr. Crone has been an occasional contributor to our sister publication Online Banking Report. His first article appeared in our 1996 issue.

As mentioned yesterday (post here), I participated on a panel entitled, Extreme Online Makeovers, at the American Bankers Association National Community Bank Convention in Palm Springs. 

Presenters included:

• Clay Morgan, creative services manager, Digital Insight
• David Rubini, product usability director, Digital Insight
• Richard Carlisle, CIO, Valley National Bank of New Mexico
• The discussion was expertly moderated by the ABA's own Doug Johnson, senior policy analyst, American Bankers Association

I promised attendees a list of the links used in my portion of the presentation. Here they are in order, along with my highly subjective letter grade of their homepage design:

1. Upcoming.org upcoming.org: Web 2.0 design/functionality (A-)
2. Wesabe wesabe.com: Quicken meets Zagat (A-)
3. Billq mybillq.com: Award-winning bill payment tracker (A)
4. Google google.com: Focus on what matters (A++)
5. Bank of America bankofamerica.com: Good design, but too much clutter (A-)
6. Wachovia wachovia.com: Not-so-great design, and even more clutter (C+)
7. ING Direct ingdirect.com: Great design, no clutter (A)
8. U.K. montage: smile.co.uk, egg.co.uk, alliance-leicester.co.uk
9. Prosper prosper.com: Interesting new P2P lender with modern design (A-)
10. E*Trade Bank etradebank.com: Great at selling key products (A)
11. High-yield savings montage: emigrantdirect.com (A), hsbcdirect.com (A), mybankingdirect.com (A)
12. Progressive Insurance progressive.com: Great comparisons to competition using scrolling summary of other users' search results (A-)
13. NextCard: No longer online (A+)
14. PayPal paypal.com: Task management built into the design (A-)
15. Countrywide Financial countrywide.com: Integration with the phone channel (B)
16. Wells Fargo blogs blog.wellsfargo.com: Look especially at the StudentLoanDown (A), which demonstrates how to communicate with a Web-savvy niche audience

Person-to-person lender, Prosper, announced its first annual user meeting next February in San Francisco. Registration is a refundable $25 and includes an all-day session with dinner on Monday, Feb. 12, and a half-day on Tuesday, Feb. 13.

The agenda has not been published. Online signup is here.

The October newsletter (see End Notes for screenshot) also announced the arrival of the group ratings, an important milestone for the nine-month-old service. Group ratings promise to help lenders locate borrowers with better-than-expected likelihood of repayment. If it works, Prosper could become a major force in consumer lending. If it doesn't, the company will have to find another way to beat the loan default odds. 

For more information:

• For prior coverage of Prosper and its U.K. rival Zopa, look here.
• For detailed analysis of the market, see Online Banking Report #127 published in March

End Notes (click on the link below to see Prosper's Oct. newsletters)

Banner advertising at About.com's banking blog <bank.about.com>

Landing page for direct navigation to <bankofamerica.com/nofeemortgage>

Landing page from bank's Google ad on "bank of america mortgage no fee"

There's much to choose from this fall, click on the link below to see the complete calendar of events of interest to online banking and financial services marketing professionals.

Update: The 2-for-1 offer is no longer available through this link. However, you can still save $350 ($700 for two) before Sept. 5 — enough for a snazzy new monitor for your desktop anyway. But first, check your inbox for an Aug. 2 or 3 email from BAI with the 2-for-1 offer. You should still be able to claim it with your promo code.

If your team is headed to Las Vegas in November to take in BAI's <bai.org> bank-tech extravaganza, you better jump on this offer before Sept. 5: two admissions for the price of one (main conference only). That will save you nearly $1,700, enough to put that new plasma display in the conference room. If you are going by yourself, you'll still save $350 with this offer.

Here's the link:  http://www.bai.org/retaildelivery/

--JB

The latest conferences for online bankers and financial marketers.

Upcoming conferences of note include:

1. BAI's Retail Delivery, Nov. 14-16 in Las Vegas; the grandaddy of banking tech conferences featuring a massive exhibit hall and thousands of attendees from around the world.
2. American Banker's Technology Forum, Oct. 11-13 in Silicon Valley; much smaller than Retail Delivery, but highly focused on online banking and payments issues.
3. BAI also offers its Combating Check & Payments Fraud Conference, Sept. 25-27 in Baltimore, MD. The first day also includes the CheckImage Forum in conjunction with ECCHO.

Click on the following link for the complete calendar through year-end:

There's still time to take in a conference before the summer hiatus. Click on the link below to see the calendar for May and June.

Conferences and events of interest to electronic payments executives.

Continue reading "Upcoming Electronic Payment-Related Conferences" »