Analyst: Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist: Dr. Doreen Galli
ABSTRACT
Fintech Meetup 2024 allowed over 4,000 attendees to not only meet up, but see an extensive collection of exhibitors and extended formal interviews as keynotes. Attendees and exhibitors agree the word that best described the event was “different”. The conference featured technologies that are specific to Fintech, those that benefit regulated industries such as fintech and healthcare and interesting technologies for enterprises including those in Fintech and in general.
The Conference
- Fintech MeetUp 2024 was held in Las Vegas, Nevada and had just over 4,000 registered attendees, with large collection of exhibiting companies.
- Attendees at CES 2024 hold titles such as CEO, Founder, Investor, VP, Director, Chief Marketing Officer, VP of Engineering, VP of Product Development, data scientists, Chief Risk Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, and lead engineer.
Highlights
- Fintech Meetup would have to be the meetups that resulted from the preparation for the event and neat matching technology in the background.
Cautions
- It is critical you keep up to date with the deadlines as the Meetup approaches to get the maximum networking from the MeetUp.
- Its much bigger than you would think by the name.
Conference Vibe
As a Meetup I had no idea what to expect as I approached the entrance. The informal font on the conference title makes it seem quite small. In reality, there were over 4,000 people there and the meeting space was literally buzzing! Did the conference meet our expectations? Well it was larger than thought but managed to maintain the quaintness you would expect from the name. I really do think everyone was so much friendlier than I ever experienced at a conference as observed in the walkabouts! There was food galore albeit I heard a lot about the heavy curry on Monday’s lunch!
In Depth Sessions
Much to our surprise there were in fact keynotes sessions. Unlike most conferences, all keynotes were interviews. TBW Advisors LLC was able to catch a few of these. Specifically, Kevin O’Leary on behalf of Beanstalk*. Interestingly, Kevin has a few quotable moments. He reported he only gives start-ups 3 years to make it. He also stated that Shark Tank investments are expected to recoup their investment within 48 hours of airing on television. Finally, he also will not invest in a company that cannot handle its own social media!
Attendees were also treated to an in depth interview of Angela Strong, a long-time venture capitalist. Angela was decidedly giddy about the quality of the current group of start-up entrepreneurs. She further delved into the depth of their experience on the exact niche of a problem they are solving.
MasterCard’s CTO, Ed McLaughlin also provided an in-depth interview to attendees. His advice is to not push new technology aside just because you have something that can do something the new technology can do. Rather, he strongly urged all to explore what the new technology can do that other technology cannot – for that is where the magic of innovation will occur. Max Neukirchen from JP Morgan also shared the passion his organization has for innovation.
Purely Fintech Plays
For banks seeking mobile image capture, UrbanFT was there to meet your needs. Likewise if you are trying internally to get data from such captures, a new startup Docsumo was there trying to get your attention. If you bank is attempting to stop fraud from skimmers, Aries Anti-fraud solution with separate numbers on the front and back of cards caught a lot of attention! If however, your organization is seeking ultimate personalization based on user data, Finalytica.ai offered an option. If your bank is in a state with legal Cannabis industry, Shieldbanking’s solution offers a method to meet AML compliance requirements.
Preventing risk, as well as the identification and removal of fraud is quite critical for those in financial services. To that end, Engima offers the ability to evaluate SMB credit decisions based on transaction history data. Seon monitors digital signals to prevent fraud. While Op-insights is offering an AI copilot for all your compliance neds. Oscilar.ai was present sharing their risk decisioning solution for financial services. In particular, they touted their purported strength in interacting with 3rd party data to offer a customer 360. Likewise, Datavisor offers end-to-end data orchestration fraud and compliance tool with full reporting and regulatory filing. What was interesting about Datavisor is that it provides a generative AI solution co-pilot to its customers; therefore, removing the need for custom services. If your organization sought a solution to monitor transactions to identify fraud, Unit21 was the booth for you.
One key to success in Fintech is successful integration. To that end, Rutter API shared their unified API. Likewise, IgniteConnect offers many prebuilt connections for Fintech in their solution that offers data and application integration.
Interesting Technology in General
As you might expect some tech was not specific to Fintech but applied to regulated industries in general. For example, Skyflow offers data privacy for regulated industries and is equally at home in healthcare. While not unusual for VCs to require this tech of their investments, Zeni provides accounting and bookings for startups regardless of what sector they serve with their customers.
There were two interesting vendors that leveraged behavioral science. Symend leverages customer behavior to increase sales as well as detect fraud. For example, some customers cannot resist a FOMO type of advertisement while others never respond. Likewise. NeuroID leverages typing patterns and copy and paste detection to identify fraud. As you might guess, most people don’t have to copy and paste their own addresses into fields, but cyber criminals do.
If you would like to regularly verify the email used to sign up is not belonging to a crime ring or fraudster, Atdata might be someone to look into. Eltropy was on display with their unified conversation platform spanning voice, text and email.
Call centers are a popular topic in Fintech. To that end, Datamatics was present with their capability to depoy as many generative AI agents as you need. Likewise, Versa.ai that specializes in conversational AI for call centers was on hand. Finally, if your product has APIs but not a developer kit and you need one to truly enable your business to take off – then check out Speakeasy.
Next Year’s Conference
Next year’s event will be March 10-13, 2025 in Las Vegas.
*When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.
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