Winners Announced for the 2019 Best of FinXTech Awards

Banks face a fundamental paradox: They need to adopt increasingly sophisticated technology to stay competitive, but most have neither the budget nor the risk appetite to develop the technology themselves.

To help banks address this challenge, a legion of fintech companies have sprung up in the past decade. The best of these are solving common problems faced by financial institutions today, from improving the customer experience, growing loans, serving small business customers and protecting against cybersecurity threats.

To this end, we at Bank Director and FinXTech have spent the past few months analyzing the most innovative solutions deployed by banks today. We evaluated the performance results and feedback from banks about their work with fintech companies, as well as the opinions of a panel of industry experts. These fintechs had already been vetted further for inclusion in our FinXTech Connect platform. We sought to identify technology companies that are tried and true — those that have successfully cultivated relationships with banks and delivered value to their clients.

Then, we highlighted those companies at this year’s Experience FinXTech event, co-hosted by Bank Director and FinXTech this week at the JW Marriott in Chicago.

At our awards luncheon on Tuesday, we announced the winning technology solutions in six categories that cover a spectrum of important challenges faced by banks today: customer experience, revenue growth, loan growth, operations, small business solutions and security.

We also announced the Best of FinXTech Connect award, a technology-agnostic category that recognizes technology firms that work closely with bank clients to co-create or customize a solution, or demonstrated consistent collaboration with financial institutions.

The winners in each category are below:

Best Solution for Customer Experience: Apiture

Apiture uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to upgrade a bank’s digital banking experience. Its platform includes digital account opening, personal financial management, cash flow management for businesses and payments services. Each feature can be unbundled from the platform.

Best Solution for Revenue Growth: Mantl

MANTL developed an account-opening tool that works with a bank’s existing core infrastructure. Its Core Wrapper API reads and writes directly to the core, allowing banks to set up, configure and maintain the account-opening product

Best Solution for Loan Growth: ProPair

ProPair helps banks pair the right loan officer with the right lead. It integrates with a bank’s systems to analyze the bank’s data for insights into behaviors, patterns and lender performance to predict which officer should be connected with a particular client.

Best Small Business Solution: P2BInvestor

P2Binvestor provides an asset-based lending solution for banks that helps them monitor risk, track collateral and administer loans. It partners with banks to give them a pipeline of qualified borrowers.

Best Solution for Improving Operations: Sandbox Banking

Sandbox Banking builds custom APIs that communicate between a bank’s legacy core systems like core processors, loan origination, customer relationship management software and data warehouses. It also builds APIs that integrate new products and automate data flow.

Best Solution for Protecting the Bank: Illusive Networks

Illusive Networks uses an approach called “endpoint-focused deception” to detect breaches into a bank’s IT system. It plants false information across a bank’s network endpoints, detects when an attacker acts on the information and captures forensics from the compromised machine. It also detects unnecessary files that could serve as tools for hackers.

Best of FinXTech Connect: Sandbox Banking

The middleware platform, which also won the “Best Solution for Improving Operations” category, was also noted for working hand-in-hand with bank staff to create custom API connections to solve specific bank issues. In addition, banks can access three-hour blocks of developer time each month to work on special projects outside of regular technical support.