Finovate Fall 2013: A Few FinTech Providers for Capital Markets

From the CIOs of Wall Street’s biggest banks to the project managers of smaller financial institutions, Finovate Fall 2013 brought in about 1000 attendees and featured 71 companies, taking up the entire conference center and almost three balconies at the Manhattan Center in New York today.

Nine vendors had to rapidly introduce products in about one hour, giving them about 7 minutes to talk about their innovations. The two-day showcase featured four sessions a day, focused mainly on the banking and payments space, sprinkled with a few asset-based and investing products.

For more: Finovate 2013: We're All Infected With Malware

The first session kicked off with Motif Investing, an online broker that offered investors a platform to collect up to 30 securities, which trade in real time with no management fees. Motif Investing calls these collections of securities a motif.

An investor would pay $9.95 to build the collection and have the ability to publish it in the Community Catalog where other customers can buy the motif. Motif Investing, launched in 2010, has announced the launch of their royalty program where investors will receive royalties every time another customer purchases their motif, available in October.

“It took us about a year to build 100 of these motifs … our customers have built 50,000 motifs,” says Hardeep Walia, co-founder and CEO of Motif Investing. “There are now more motifs then there are mutual funds and ETFs and we haven’t even started yet.”

Another company that focused on investing was TipRanks, a cloud-based browser application that uses algorithms to search, analyze and rate which analyst offers the best recommendation on a trade.

Launched in 2012, TipRanks uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to evaluate articles and blogs from sites like Barron’s or BusinessWeek. It then compares the analyst predictions in the article to how the stock is performing before making a recommendation on which analyst has the best advice.

According to their website, “TipRanks provides unbiased information and is not affiliated with any analyst firm.”

"TipRanks can be used as a powerful research tool," says Tomer Turgeman, VP of business development at TipRanks. "The search tool lets you tap into a wide feed of recommendations, being made anywhere on the web, in real-time, alongside a measured performance."

Motif Investing and TipRanks are just two of the financial technology providers focused on asset and data management for investors at Finovate Fall 2013. Although there are only a few companies focused on technology for capital markets, based on today's presentations, tomorrow should be full of new innovative ideas. Zarna Patel is a staff writer for InformationWeek's Financial Services brands, which include Bank Systems & Technology, Insurance & Technology and Wall Street & Technology. She received her B.A. in English and journalism from Rutgers University College of Arts and Sciences in ... View Full Bio