Avoiding the Fintech Hype: My interview with Ron Shevlin

I attended FinovateFall last week. I will dig in to some of the trends in a future issue, but in short the conference was great! In addition to having 70+ fintech companies to connect with, the attendee list is a Who’s Who in financial technology, so the opportunity to connect with founders, investors, thought leaders, and industry execs was the most valuable part of the conference.

One person I had a chance to connect with was Ron Shevlin, Director of Research at Cornerstone Advisors. In lieu of an article today, I am releasing the audio of a 10 minute conversation I had with Ron during the conference. There was no quiet place in the venue, so please excuse the background noise. We cover Ron’s thoughts on how the fintech narrative has changed over the last 18 months, how banks should think about a 5–10 year strategy, and separating the noise from real innovation.

You can listen to my interview with Ron Shevlin here, and follow him on Twitter @rshevlin.

Biometrics

Biometrics (facial recognition, voice authentication, etc.) was a major theme last week at Finovate. One of the companies presenting was EyeVerify, which leverages the unique blood vessel patterns and other microfeatures of your eyes to provide unique authentication process for mobile apps. It was announced this week that they were acquired by Ant Financial (part of Alibaba) for $100MM. Wells Fargo is a current customer, in addition to some regional banks, and Alibaba plans to use the technology to verify peer-to-peer payments on Alipay.

Home Equity

Point, a platform that allows homeowners to sell equity participation in their home, raised $8.4MM in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Vikram Pandit and Bloomberg Beta also participated. Point will give homeowners cash upfront in exchange for a percentage of the home’s increase in equity. The homeowner ends up paying Point back when they sell the home, the term ends (up to 10 years), or they can buyout the agreement during the period.

Technology > Branches

USAA has ended their branch experiment. They built 14 high-tech, tellerless branches back in 2012 in an attempt to deliver face-to-face advice for more complex products. However, they now report that only 2.5% of their customers visit a branch, so they are closing 17 of their branches. To offset this, they plan on doubling their ATM network.