Celebrating Black History Month with Voices from the Finovate Stage

Celebrating Black History Month with Voices from the Finovate Stage

For a second year in a row, Finovate is commemorating Black History Month by showcasing those Black and African-American founders and executives who demoed their company’s fintech innovations on the Finovate stage in 2022.

Ariam Sium – VP of Product with FinGoal

Sium not only leads Product at FinGoal, the self-described “Listener. Thinker. Doer” also led FinGoal to a Best of Show award at FinovateSpring last year. In her role at FinGoal, Sium said that she uses the tenets of focus and value to govern each product decision made in the rapidly changing world of fintech.

FinGoal most recently demoed its technology at FinovateFall in September. The Boulder, Colorado-based company offers an insights platform that helps financial institutions better understand their customers.

Joseph Akintolayo – CEO and Founder of Deposits

Akintolayo is a “builder of ethical products that solve complex problems in fintech, insurtech, and social enterprise.” As CEO and founder of Deposits, Akintolayo heads a startup that offers banks, brands, and communities a plug and play solution to deliver financial services such as payments and lending, without requiring coding experience.

Deposits made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in September. The Dallas, Texas-based company was founded in 2021.

Left to right: Joseph Akintolayo and Samuel Ailemen of Deposits

Samuel Ailemen – Director of Mobile and Identity at Deposits

As Director of Mobile and Identity at Deposits, Ailemen helped lead the company’s demo at FinovateFall 2022. A fraud prevention expert who is “building cool stuff everywhere”, Ailemen leverages his talent as “a software engineer who loves research” to solve real-world problems using new technologies.

Nathan Gibbons – Chief Experience Officer at QuickFi

Gibbons oversees the customer experience at QuickFi, a company that provides “nearly instant,” self-service 24/7 term financing to business equipment buyers. Demoing the company’s technology at FinovateFall last year, Gibbons and colleague Jillian Munson earned QuickFi its first Finovate Best of Show award.

A C-suite executive with QuickFi since 2018, Gibbons previously spent more than 11 years as Project Manager and later Vice President with First American Equipment Finance. QuickFi was launched by founders of First American Equipment Finance in 2018.

Michael Duncan – CEO and Founder of Bankjoy

Founder and CEO of Bankjoy, Duncan demoed his company’s Business Banking Platform at FinovateFall 2022. The company he launched in 2015 offers a range of modern banking technology solutions, including mobile and online banking, as well as a banking API.

Before founding Bankjoy, Duncan spent more than four years as a Programmer/Analyst and later Software Development Manager at Michigan First Credit Union.

Michael Broughton – CEO and Co-founder of Altro

Broughton co-founded and is CEO of Altro, a solution that helps consumers build credit through non-traditional recurring payment processes such as rent and even monthly subscriptions to services like Netflix. Altro’s app is free-to-use, and helps increase financial literacy while boosting existing credit and helping stabilize credit histories. The company made its Finovate debut last May at FinovateSpring.

Broughton is also Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors for the USC Credit Union (since 2017), and was both a Scout at Sequoia Capital and a Thiel Fellow at The Thiel Foundation.

Christen Wright – Head of Product at Spave

As Head of Product at Spave, Wright was part of the three-person demo team that won Best of Show at the company’s Finovate debut last May at FinovateSpring. Spave is a financial wholeness solution that enables users to easily save and donate as they purchase products and services. The Spave app provides purchase tracking and analysis, goal setting, group giving, and more.

Wright has a diverse background, having served in senior management roles at AT&T and Delta Air Lines. A member of 100 Black Men of Atlanta, a mentoring and empowerment organization for African American youth, Wright is a graduate of the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, where he earned an MBA.

Anthony Heckman – as Director of Sales at unitQ

Heckman was part of the founding team at unitQ, a company that turns customer insights into data-driven decisions for firms ranging from Chime to fellow Finovate alum Klarna. At FinovateSpring 2022, Heckman led the company’s live demo of its unitQ monitor, which serves as a centralized, searchable, repository for customer feedback.

Heckman founded TWC Advisors in October of last year. The firm specializes in providing go-to-market and sales support to early-stage, high-growth, VC-backed startups.


Photo by Elijah O’Donnell

Best of Show: The Finovate Podcast’s Greg Palmer Chats with the Faves from FinovateSpring

Best of Show: The Finovate Podcast’s Greg Palmer Chats with the Faves from FinovateSpring

Join Finovate VP and Host of the Finovate Podcast Greg Palmer as he shares his video conversations with companies that earned Best of Show honors at FinovateSpring in May.


Greg Palmer talks with Rob Frohwein, co-founder of Keep Financial, which won Best of Show honors at FinovateSpring 2022. Demo video.

“What Keep does is it enables employers to implement what we call ‘investing cash plans’ which is a new compensation technique that enables an employer to issue what’s essentially a retention bonus, but that cash is provided on the front end of some period of time … There’s an ongoing obligation of the employee to stick around the company for whatever the vesting period is and, once they hit that vesting period or vesting periods along the way, that portion, or all of the debt that they owe for getting that retention bonus up front, disappears.”


Greg Palmer chats with Susan Sarensen Langer, CEO of Spave, which won Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2022. Demo video.

“Spave is all about helping realize financial wholeness and more balance in their life. You can think of Spave as a number of apps altogether. It’s Mint. It’s Acorns. It’s Digit. It’s United Way. It’s Venmo. All in one. We want people to be able to use their spending, so Spave is all based on people’s spending … (That) spending ignites micro amounts that we call “spavings”. So you can either round up spare change, you can apply a percent, you can spave now and do a one-time donation or one-time savings (set-aside) … We’re helping people decide how they’re going to save for their future, give to the causes that they care about and live a more balanced whole life.”


Greg Palmer interviews Nathan Gibbons, Chief Operating Officer at QuickFi, one of the companies that won Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2022. Demo video.

“QuickFi is a business financing platform that really is meant to serve banks and manufacturers. It enables them to offer their business customers a secure, completely digital way of applying for an consummating lower rate term loans in a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks. (This is) because the platform is 100% digital and self-service. It really allows banks and manufacturers to close more loans and more sales faster and much more cost-effectively.”


Greg Palmer talks with Leigh Gross, SVP of Sales and Revenue with Array. FinovateSpring 2022 Best of Show winner. Demo video.

“We’re an innovation platform that helps banks, credit unions, and other fintechs offer cutting-edge financial tools to their customers. For example, we offer credit and identity protection solutions, personal privacy components that we allow our partners to easily embed within their experience so they can offer these services directly to their customers.”


Greg Palmer chats with Ariam Sium, VP of Product with Fingoal. FinovateSpring 2022 Best of Show winner. Demo video.

“We build insights and data infrastructure for financial institutions. The fintech space has a lot left to be desired when it comes to serving actual human beings. And that’s really where (Fingoal) shines. When it comes to our insights, it’s the personalization that actually makes them worth anything. And when it comes to our technical solutions for our clients … at the end of the day we’re improving the overall user experience. It’s also nice that it happens to save the financial institutions money and time.”


Greg Palmer catches up with Janice Diner, CEO, and Steve Frook, SVP of Global Sales with Horizn, which won Best of Show honors at FinovateSpring 2022. Demo video.

“We solve quite a few business problems (for financial institutions). But the three that Steve probably will talk about a little later is reduce the cost to serve digital customers, increase the number of fully-digital customers, drive mass adoption of new products and features. We do this by educating both customers and employees across the full bank ecosystem: retail banking, business banking, wealth management, insurance, just to name a few.”

Stay tuned for more videos from Greg Palmer and the Finovate Podcast’s Conversations with Best of Show winners.


Photo by Abet Llacer

FinovateSpring 2022 Best of Show Winners Announced

FinovateSpring 2022 Best of Show Winners Announced

The votes have been cast and counted! Meet the winners of Best of Show for FinovateSpring 2022:

Array for its financial enablement platform, specializing in embeddable tools and white label solutions, used by leading financial institutions. Demo.

FinGoal for its insights platform that cleans, enriches, and analyzes personal financial data to better understand users and provide actionable insights. Demo.

Horizn for its platform that helps banks globally accelerate digital banking knowledge, fluency, and adoption with both customers and employees. Demo.

Keep Financial Technology for its innovation that solves the hiring and retention challenges of companies by introducing a new form of employee compensation called Cash Vesting Plans. Demo.

QuickFi for its 100% digital, self-service, mobile equipment financing platform that enables business equipment financing in minutes. Demo.

Spave for its all-in-one financial wholeness app that allows users to effortlessly save and give as they spend. Demo.

Our thanks to all of our demoing companies, our sponsors, our partners, and – of course – our attendees – for continuing to make FinovateSpring such a success. Thank you for being a part of our annual spring fintech conference. We’ll see you again next year!


Notes on methodology:
1. Only audience members NOT associated with demoing companies were eligible to vote. Finovate employees did not vote.
2. Attendees were encouraged to note their favorites during each day. At the end of the last demo, they chose their three favorites.
3. The exact written instructions given to attendees: “Please rate (the companies) on the basis of demo quality and potential impact of the innovation demoed.”
4. The six companies appearing on the highest percentage of submitted ballots were named “Best of Show.”
5. Go here for a list of previous Best of Show winners through 2014. Best of Show winners from our 2015 through 2022 conferences are below:
FinovateEurope 2015
FinovateSpring 2015
FinovateFall 2015
FinovateEurope 2016
FinovateSpring 2016
FinovateFall 2016
FinovateAsia 2016
FinovateEurope 2017
FinovateSpring 2017
FinovateFall 2017
FinovateAsia 2017
FinovateMiddleEast 2018
FinovateEurope 2018
FinovateSpring 2018
FinovateFall 2018
FinovateAsia 2018
FinovateAfrica 2018
FinovateEurope 2019
FinovateSpring 2019
FinovateFall 2019
FinovateAsia 2019
FinovateMiddleEast 2019
FinovateEurope 2020
FinovateFall 2020
FinovateWest 2020
FinovateEurope 2021
FinovateSpring 2021
FinovateFall 2021
FinovateEurope 2022

FinovateSpring 2022 Sneak Peek: Spave

FinovateSpring 2022 Sneak Peek: Spave

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 18 and 19. Register today and save your spot.

Spave lets users tap into everyday purchases to increase their savings, give to causes that matter to them, and have control and confidence in their finances. Spave transforms your spending, for good.

Features

  • We have a patent-pending engine that allows users to choose where they direct their spavings
  • Access to more than 1.5 million accredited U.S. nonprofits
  • Partners gain access to user insights

Why it’s great

Spave can help CUs empower their members to save more, give more, and live more by breaking down the barriers that hold them back. Empower your members to transform spending for good.

Presenters

Susan Langer, CEO
Three words best describe Langer: Observer. Planner. Connector. Langer is a life-long learner and lover of people. Her 30-year professional journey within financial services, marketing and advertising, international development, and non-profit industries has taught her the value of listening to understand, the significance of appreciating others’ differences, and the extraordinary power of collaboration.
LinkedIn

Sarah York, Chief Marketing & Digital Officer
York is an active advocate for inclusive entrepreneurship and financial literacy. Her expertise spans data-driven growth, digital technology platforms, as well as global digital strategy.
LinkedIn

Christen Wright, Head of Product
Wright is a seasoned product leader, leading product for Reseda Group, a CUSO of MSUFCU. He has contributed to experiences at Delta, AT&T, and Best Buy. He was in 100 Black Men of Atlanta in 2020.
LinkedIn