Sorry, consumers, the FinTech scene in New York isn’t about you; it’s about Wall Street traders.
That was the upshot at last week’s New York FinTech meetup in Midtown Manhattan, which featured demos from five startups, four of them built for traders. Here’s our quick take on the presenting companies:
Inovance provides an engine called Traide that is able to help investors “catch nonlinear trends in data,” according to CEO Tad Staff. Traders enter certain data points, and Traide brings them together to be analyzed by its algorithm. (Algorithm is a fancy word for a calculation that occurs in software.) Traide is pre-loaded with FXCM data, and investors can upload their own data as well.
Polly Portfolio is a robo advisor in beta, but rather than targeting millennials, Polly is intended to be the backend to another advisory service. CEO Jasen Yang called it “a new way to deliver investment management expertise.” The service is built with plug-ins to several databases to supplement an investment manager’s existing knowledge and connections. Polly Portfolio could also see life as a B2C service likely targeting the same crowd as Betterment and Wealthfront.
QBeats‘ VP of Sales Joel Kandy showed off Winqs, a system allowing media companies to offer content for micropayments on sites. The example he cited was financial content aimed at investors, but Winqs is not limited to this area, and also offers content related to sports and entertainment. Micropayments for content is not a new idea, but Kandy claimed QBeats is signing partnerships that will make the concept finally take off. The payment mechanism was not revealed, but is likely that users’ card information is stored in the system. Payments may be batched to cut down on processing fees, in the manner of LevelUp. Otherwise, a bunch of $0.08 payments on a Visa card might cause some headaches.
Tradier was billed as “the first brokerage API company” by head of marketing and community Rio Slaven. Tradier, she said, is to online trading what Stripe and PayPal are to online payments. Hey, she’s in marketing. She also coined the phrase “retail investing unbundled.” The idea appeared to be that any company can offer brokerage services, or at least market information, on its site by accessing the Tradier API. Slaven’s pitch was that currently consumer choice is artificially limited by services claiming privileged information and access, when actually the information can be broadly distributed at low costs.
YHat boasts a team formerly at online business lender OnDeck Capital and billed itself as “enterprise software for data science.” It already counts Malta-based Ferratum Bank, an important player in European online lending, as a customer. YHat’s software is useful outside the lending space, the company said, with “use cases” for fintech companies requiring data for credit scoring, fraud detection, and handling customer churn. “It’s a workbench to analyze data and crunch numbers,” said founder and CTO Greg Lamp. He also agreed with a questioner that it could be considered “DevOps for data science and analytics.” (DevOps is a collaborative method of software development, but you already knew that.)
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