It’s May, and the sound of fintech demos are in the air. You know the drill—top fintechs get 7 minutes to talk about their latest innovations. This year, the conference convenes in San Diego. Right on the marina, a beautiful venue.
I can’t resist sharing my on-the-spot notes and observations. These are just a handful of the demos that I heard today.
Invesst
Financial terminals – do investment analysts still use those? Apparently they do. Seems like some firms using these platforms are caught in the 90’s. What comes next? Well the obvious answer is AI, and that’s at the heart of the Invesst solution. The pain point they address? If you don’t use a high-priced investment research terminal, you burn tons of hours trying to stitch together data from many sources. Invesst tries to bring this together and take it to the next generation. This is an AI platform that makes life easier for equity analysts. Attach 40 different sources. Deploys multiple agents to address user queries. I can’t say that I experience the pain, but it seems like a reasonable solution. But, I do wonder how they compete with the amazing “deep research” capabilities of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other platforms.
Casca
Digital lending for small business, enabling community banks to win back loans that are going to predatory lenders. The core offering uses an AI agent. Typically, an applicant may not have all of the info they need to complete a loan app. The AI looks at where they dropped out of the flow, and helps them to address the missing information. Casca helps to increase conversion rates. Sarah is the AI agent, it can also review loan origination docs. Has a voice interface to review underwriting. Sarah can generate the term sheet. From small business to commercial real estate loans. I can definitely see the need, but wonder how it can integrate into existing bank origination and compliance processes.
Illuma 
Illuma shield offers voice authentication for call centers. Their focus: “easier, faster, more secure authentication”. No passwords, instant verification. Deepfake clone of your voice? In the demo, the Illuma shield product was able to detect it. This is accessible to community Fis. Easy to integrate, particularly for Fis with cloud-based contact center platforms. Impressive demo!
APIMatic
API recipes to onboard new customers in hours and minutes, not weeks and months. Deterministically created code, not AI. With business logic, providing results without writing code. The recipe and code can be chosen by programming language. With 7 languages, and 4 existing “recipes”. Recipe #2 takes the output of one API call, and feeds it into another API call. There is also AI co-pilot to create new recipes. AI is trained on APImatic code. Copy/Paste/Run with new code. The tech can also be used by non-coders. Focus is on onboarding of new customers to the API. On the AI side, they can enable consumer interactions.
Penny Finance
Financial planning platform. Starts with the goals, attitudes, and financial profile—13 question profile. Creates visualization of their financial situation. Link your accounts via Plaid. Provides a plan for paying off debt and meeting financial goals (like buying a home). No budgeting function, just inflows & outflows. You helped her with the financial plan and checklist. “Now she is loyal to you.” Hmmmm, don’t think that is how consumers really think about financial services. But I like their goal, to deliver on financial wellness. “People don’t want to learn about money, they want to learn about their own money.” That is really a great point. This is a respectable offering, but in some ways, seems like a throwback to Finovate 2016. Not sure how this idea stands out in today’s crowded market.
Instarails
The company is positioned in the very hot cross-border payment space. They are tacking hidden cross-border markup fees. Correspondent banks capture this revenue as intermediaries. “Expensive for your customers.” Could be an opportunity for banks to grow revenue and provide a service that is increasingly needed into a globally-connected economy. Their solution is a cross-border payment network with instant and globally-compliant payments. They have white-label experience as well as UI dashboard. Batch payments can be used for transactions. Both B2B and B2C transactions supported. Fraud check, sanctions check, built-in with real time detection. Can review why it was flagged. Can add notes for audit purposes. If you’re interested in cross-border payments, particularly with instant payments, take a closer look at Instarails.
Well, that’s the first batch. Hope to add mire notes here as the conference progresses. Check back for updates!
Who is Beyond the Arc? We help banks and fintech providers differentiate with the right marketing strategies and product content.
https://beyondthearc.com/communications/b2b-payments-marketing
Day 2: More fintech startups take the Finovate stage
Here are a few more real-time takes of startup companies at the show. As a reminder, each company has just 7 minutes to showcase their product. No videos. No powerpoint. Just hands-on product demos in a rapid-fire session.
65 million Spanish-speakers in the US. They are building a cross-border payment platform for sending money to Latin America. This can be integrated into community bank digital payments. $1B in transactions sent by Felix. Integrates with WhatsApp to send payments. There’s a network of payout options, including banks in Latin America as well as digital wallets. Very impressed with how Felix operates within the WhatsApp environment. The solution can be embedded into a bank’s mobile app, but Felix handles the customer support. This is a new take on facilitating remittances.
Covet provides a platform to actively management all estate estates, including personal property and digital assets. They are headquartered in Irvine, CA and were founded in 2022. Modern view of a client’s entire estate. Asset values update automatically, and clients can take photos of assets they own. AI will recognize the property and generate an estimate of asset value. Advisors usually only see 70-80% of a client’s full estate. Covet generates an estate summary report to see a holistic view. Covet sees this as a way to retain beneficiaries after the wealth transfer. The demo focuses on deepening the client relationship.
State and Federal regulatory license agent. What licenses do you need to enter certain businesses? Long list of products and jurisdictions. Interestingly, this is a subsidiary of a major law firm (Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe). I love seeing this kind of innovation! The platform helps you keep up to date on licensing requirements. From their website, “Winnow saves you time managing and keeping up with regulatory changes by delivering accurate results tailored to your business so you can lend and service with ease.” It’s a way to reduce the cost spent on outside counsel and compliance advisors. Smart move, they recognize clients are working hard to reduce l egal costs. This is based on 85,000 legal hours from 140 attorneys. AI tool helps to mine this information and answer questions. Looks like this product launched in March 2025, here is the press release.
This is an embedded lending solution for business lending, executed by AI agents. Credit, compliance, and risk can be managed with AI. The promise is that costs can be reduced by 66%. Here’s how the company describes it, “QuickFi is an end-to-end loan and lease servicing platform, eliminating our partners’ need to manage complex equipment leasing software systems and eliminating costly servicing, collection, customer service, IT, security and other staff costs.” QuickFi has a compelling idea, on the face of it. Is this too disruptive for banks? In the near term, it may be. Raises many questions about AI governance and oversight. But no doubt about it, this is a path forward.
The company is leveraging AI to support financial wellness. They say, “Our AI-powered chatbot not only facilitates a safety net for bill payments but also empowers users with personalized insights and rewards to foster financial wellness.” They have a new offering, Spot My Bill. What bill do you need help with? The bill is setup in bill pay, and prompts to setup direct deposit. This info is used to approve an advance to cover the bill. And in the meantime, the bank has deepened the connection. There’s a dashboard that tracks the customer’s financial wellness, as well as her sentiment and engagement.
The company describes itself as, “The world’s first fully decentralized biometrics, where personal privacy meets digital security.” They go on to say, “we are committed to enabling a privacy by design framework for the entire identity management ecosystem.” The demo notes that passwords, SMS, and legacy MFA is ineffective against modern scammers. They make use of a user selfie for authentication. This breaks the biometrics into multiple pieces, which is then stored in different cloud systems. Here’s more on their biometric system. My take: Anonybit is taking a fresh look at biometric authentication. I like the idea of decentralizing the data to protect it.
The company provides AI customer support for financial institutions. This is a pre-seed company founded in 2023. The AI agent works via a voice interface. They try to bait the voice AI to talk about politics, but the AI declines. You can train the voices or use one of their defaults. They are not trying to replace call center bankers, they want to us AI to extend your coverage. They also have a co-pilot to support live agents. This is a Y Combinator company, which is usually a good indicator of future potential. You can call the demo number and try it yourself: (857)574-4777
This company helps Fis manage dispute processes. Here’s how they describe themselves: “Quinte combines technological innovation with human expertise to enable financial institutions to achieve process efficiencies, strengthen customer and member loyalty, and increase competitive advantage.” There’s the ability to implement rule-based approach to any type of dispute. This NY-based company has been in business since 2007. That definitely makes them a fintech OG. I’m surprised they have not hit my radar before.
Tavant is applying AI to drive down sales costs in the lending process. The company is in Santa Clara, California in the heart of the Silicon Valley but they note their solutions are used in over 150 countries worldwide. While the demo focuses on a lending use case, they offer custom-built AI Agents for enterprises across financial services and other industries. In the demo, they discuss a score for each borrower, to assess the borrower’s level of experience. And the AI agent adjusts it’s dialog accordingly. This could be a practical way to act on the promise of personalization.