The Banktastics

Thanks for following Brad & Mark’s reviews of Finovate Startup! Read their reviews of the 40 demoing companies live all day long here at the Banktastic Blog! Let’s continue on with the second set of companies!

Guardian Analytics - Fraud Map
Brad’s Review:
Looks crazy difficult to use. Fraud Prevention is important, but people in banks want/need easy to use apps, too. My one word review: meh.

Mark’s Review:
Amazingly streamlined and robust backend tool to monitor online account activity. On the first look, looks like a must have for any security analyst.

Jwaala - MoneyTracker
Brad’s Review: Built for bankers and credit unions. Bringing the iGoogle, Netvibes metaphor into online banking. The widgets translate onto anywhere it’s embeddable. How is security involved? I’ll ask them for a video interview.

Mark’s Review:
Software sold to banks and credit union to bring online banking for netvibes-type flair. Embeddable widgets and super easy search are just some of the highlights

Zecco
Brad’s Review:
Free stock trading. You can share your portfolios with each other. Can see why people are purchasing stocks and can ‘follow’ their trends be friending them. Love it, and was the first speaker to get cut off.

Mark’s Review:
Free online stock trading (min account balance $2500 and up to 10 transactions) with super charged community aspects. Sharing of full portfolios, motives behind trades, and member-to-member communication.

Guard ID - ID Vault
Brad’s Review:
Token-based security for many sites (shopping, online accounts, etc.) Internet problems along the way. Gives you a secured browser to work through. For the security inclined, pretty straightforward device and good price point $49.95 (get it at BestBuy).

Mark’s Review:
Cool usb device to help secure online transactions of any kind. However, going through their custom browser is definitely more trouble than it’s worth.

Cake Financial
Brad’s Review:
Must note, first Mac presenter! Social networking for investing. Can use the last 10 years of transactional history. Love the fact that you don’t have to move everything to their service. It works as a dashboard with a community behind it. You can track what others are doing. Got cut off! Oopsy.

Mark’s Review:
Stock tracking community application. Much improved over something like a Yahoo and is on par with Zecco in most features, though it doesn’t do any of the actual transactions.

VaultStreet
Brad’s Review:
Document warehouse to manage documents instead of paper-based. Interface is tough, but the process of document management isn’t an easier one to implement properly.

Mark’s Review:
Web-based paperless document vault that includes some secure sharing capabilities. I still see the need for localized paperless copies.

Mint
Brad’s Review:
Online personal finance software. Winner of Finovate last year and the Techcrunch40. Users gravitate towards easy to setup products (understatement of the year?) I’ve seen his demo a few times now. I think it’s funny that despite the ‘ways to save’, he doesn’t go to his partners to ’save’. Now doing investment tracking (a la Cake Financial). Almost got cut off, but wrapped up just in time.

Mark’s Review:
Personal Finance Manager with some of the coolest graphs out there. Also easy budgeting and spending analysis. Came off arrogant.

GreenNote
Brad’s Review:
New alternative to traditional student loans. Nice, 1 character password to login, secure! Social networking for funding student loans…Model is school centric and they don’t look at students’ credit scores. So loaning from people that they know. Still in private beta, has potential in my opinion.

Mark’s Review:
Application built to help students tap into their social network to get loan money for college. In reality looks like an cowardly but formal way to ask your immediate and extended family for money for school.

SmartHippo
Brad’s Review:
Ensuring to find the best mortgage rates out there. Not using ‘preferred’ vendors, trying to be completely unbiased. Customers can also rate the bank and the deals they got, like it. You can blog for free from their interface, but can you import RSS? Good place for the beginner.

Mark’s Review:
Website to help people find rates. Great aggregate of information, and could really help during the research part of looking for loans, if you actually do that.

Motley Fool CAPS
Brad’s Review:
Community generated stock trades. (Lots of these today.) He shows the good returns his system got. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the community that created that, focus on them! Obviously a lot of interest in this space but this service is for the investment saavy, not the novice.

Mark’s Review:
Community driven stocks rating whose average 3 star stock outperforms the S&P 500. If you are really into investing analysis and love community, this is a must check out!

Also, we’d like to encourage you to check out another blog that’s covering Finovate! Go visit the Creative Brand Communication Blog for another perspective of Finovate’s presenters!

To check out the rest of the reviews from Finovate:
click here for the first set of 10 demo reviews,
click here for the third set of 10 demo reviews,
and click here for the last set of 10 demo reviews.