Bank Director Reveals 2020 FinXTech Connect Award Winners

In 1993, Bill Oesterle was looking for
contractors that could work on an old house he purchased in Indianapolis’
Meridian-Kessler neighborhood. He had been burned by contractors before and
didn’t want to rely on the phone book to find a new one.

A co-worker pointed him to Unified Alliance, a
group of neighbors that shared resources and recommendations through a
newsletter and call-in service. He joined the group and grew to depend on it.

When Oesterle moved to Columbus, Ohio, a few years
later, he was dismayed to find that a similar group didn’t exist there and enlisted
a former intern, Angie Hicks, to build a new version. After researching service
providers and customers, the company launched a website that came to be known
as Angie’s List. It had 5 million members by 2016.

FinXTech Connect takes a page from the same
playbook.

No one knows banking technology better than the people who use it. Given this, FinXTech gathers insights from bankers, aggregates those insights, and then distills them into actionable information to help banks find reliable technology partners.

The intelligence we gather from banks powers
our FinXTech Connect platform, a curated directory of bank-friendly fintechs.
It also informs our annual FinXTech Connect awards.

This week marked Bank Director’s second annual
Experience FinXTech conference. The event brings together bank and technology
leaders for demonstrations and conversations about what’s now and next in
banking. Demos are open to technology companies that have been vetted for the
Connect platform, so attendees can be sure they’re hearing from proven
partners.

The event and awards have never been more important, given the role technology plays in making it possible for banks to provide service in a socially distanced world.

Great examples can be found among this year’s
Best of FinXTech award winners, which were announced on the final day of the
event.

The Best Solution for Customer Experience went
to SmartLaunch, a digital bank-in-a-box that helps institutions provide
services and grow deposits remotely. Created by NYMBUS, SmartLaunch enables
banks to launch standalone digital brands that operate on the NYMBUS SmartCore.
In this way, a bank’s digital brand can run parallel to its legacy systems –
providing a low risk way to experiment with new digital offerings.

Another example is performance-marketing solution, Fintel Connect. With travel significantly curtailed, billboards and signage don’t provide the marketing punch they used to. Bank marketers are looking to retool their strategies, with performance-based, digital marketing offering an alternative avenue for acquiring customers online.

Fintel Connect won the Best Solution for
Revenue Growth category, as well as the overall Best of FinXTech Connect award
this year. Their technology enables banks to approach digital marketing from a
new angle – instead of paying for impressions or clicks, banks only pay when
viewers convert into customers.

Here’s the full list of winners:

• Best Solution for Customer
  Experience: NYMBUS SmartLaunch
• Best Solution for Loan Growth:
  SavvyMoney
• Best Solution for Improving
  Operations: Cinchy
• Best Business Solution: Brex
• Best Solution for Protecting the
  Bank: ARGO OASIS
• Best Solution for Revenue Growth:
  Fintel Connect
• Best of FinXTech Connect: Fintel
  Connect

More information on these solutions can be found here.

During Experience FinXTech, Bank Director also launched a new research product, leveraging lessons we’ve learned from curating the Connect platform. Our inaugural data intelligence report is titled “APIs: Creating New Opportunities for Revenue and Efficiency.” You can access it for free by clicking here. Angie’s List capitalized on the dawning of the internet to replicate neighborly advice. In a similar way, FinXTech relies on the collective wisdom of bankers to cut through the noise in the technology landscape and help banks find ideal partners.