Reflections on Finovate Fall 2011

Okay, so it's been a week now since Finovate Fall 2011 and I think we've almost recovered from what was a crazy but fruitful few days. Not only did we get involved in Finovate but were at Sibos in Toronto as a finalist in the Innotribe Startup competition. Two big events...one week - please organisers, don't let this happen again, we're not sure we can handle it!

These two major industry events are actually quite different. Sibos is very much the institutional side of banking - sponsored by SWIFT and attended by almost every major bank in the world. Innotribe is SWIFT’s initiative to foster collaborative innovation in financial services and we'd like to congratulate the winners of the Startup competition Guardwise and Truaxis (BillShrink).

In contrast Finovate is the 'Fashion week' (so called by bankinnovation.net) of the Consumer Finance space. This year Finovate had a record attendance hitting their target of 1,000 people and this provided the support for what was truly a great event….well almost, but more on that later. As a young company trying to make a real difference in how products are sold online Finovate was a great opportunity for us to meet some of the key influencers in the industry. It was almost back-to-back networking, meetings and introductions that lasted well beyond the two day event. A definite recommendation for anyone launching into the space and coming back to Europe next Spring with, from what I understand from the organisers, a definite focus to make it a key event outside North America.

A big congratulations to the winners of 'Best in Show' for all of their hard work (you can check them out here). It was great to see some fantastic presentations. Unfortunately we were hit by the wifi gremlins and weren't able to show what we wanted to in the seven minutes we had. We did get a chance afterwards to re-record our demo for the video and we hope to be able to share this with you very soon.

Hopefully we were able to illustrate partially what miiCard is here to do - that is providing a system where for the first time you can prove you are who you say you are...purely online and in real-time. The feedback from those who visited our stand was great, along with some definite validation there is a pain in the market that needs solved.

Much like Finovate Europe in the Spring the majority of the companies at FinovateFall were based around rewards, Personal Finance Management (PFM) and vendor tools. What we didn't see was a huge amount of future thinking and innovation. This was reflected in the Tweets and some of the attendees that we talked too. Hopefully next year we will see more out of the box thinking and innovation.

So what did we learn? Live demo's are always challenging even when everything works, the industry isn't as innovative as we would sometimes like to think, and online identity and validation (although slightly different in the US) is still a big issue for everyone.

Finally a bit thank you to the Finovate organisers for a great event - despite the hickups :)