Outstanding in the Field: FinovateSpring 2011 Showcase

Finovate hosted their spring event this week at the San Francisco Design Center, bringing together the latest and greatest innovators for payments and financial service technologies in a massive exhibition hall in the city by the bay. The San Francisco Bay Area has been a global leader in business model and technology innovation, giving birth to such household names as Apple, Google, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Intel… the list of global technology leaders born and bred in Northern California goes on and on.

So it seemed perhaps fitting that a two-day marathon of technology innovator exhibitions and demonstrations should come to San Francisco to showcase the great ideas, amazing products, and groundbreaking businesses that are bringing a financial services industry — still reeling from a liquidity crisis and regulatory incursions — some much-needed new blood. A host of companies pitched their approach to breathing new life and driving new life into established financial services businesses.  If there were key themes to the presentations at FinovateSpring2011, they were these: partnership, mash-up and mobile.

Partnership: Increasingly, financial services firms are finding that their new approach to innovation is to find other firms — often small and often with a unique approach to a technology or business model — to innovate for them. While this has been true before, the unique twist today is that larger financial services firms are striking unique partnerships with these smaller organizations through a combination of contractual relationship, minority investment and open platform interface deployment

Mash-up: The new breed of financial services innovators are bringing disparate ecosystems by delivering common platform capabilities to pull together new value propositions from the best that multiple industries can provide to their common customers: businesses and consumers. Fascinating exhibitions this week have pulled together the best of marketing and payments, open interfaces and eCom gateways, online banking and alternative payments, and marketing and…

Mobile: As in almost all things today, the point of convergence for common platform mash-ups from financial service innovators is in mobility and mobile, connected devices. Mobile devices and the rapid adoption of anytime, anywhere connected devices is changing the face of commerce. And if this week’s conference has shown us a thing about the future of commerce, it’s that connected convergent commerce is the future for financial services. And at FinovateSpring2011, the opportunities for mobile enabled mash-up partnerships are in full bloom.