Finovate 2008 Coverage - The Third 6 Presenters!
<font>SmartHippo</font>
Mark’s Review: 
An online community built to help increase simplicity and transparency in the mortgage lending process. Includes community ratings. Rate search engine that pulls from several sources, including other members. Lenders can feed their rates into SmartHippo for FREE, which can help smaller FIs (especially credit unions) get more exposure for their great rates.
I think your FI needs to be feeding your rates into SmartHippo if you are in their market.
A community-driven site geared toward helping its members save money and find the best interest rates. Members can rate different lenders in several different areas. You can give your specific information on what you’re looking for in a borrower, and the site will show you the best rates with different lenders. It’s free for lenders to show their rates on SmartHippo. The site looks great and easy to use. Community members share information on rates and FIs, but SmartHippo also goes and searches for rates to aggregate it all on their site. I’m loving this!
Lisa’s Review: 
<font>LendingClub</font>
Mark’s Review:
An SEC registered (that’s a big deal) peer to peer lending site for borrowers with good credit which has kept their default rate for their lenders under 2% since their launch. In addition to allowing lenders to actually pick up loans from borrowers, Lending Club has also added a trading platform that allows them to trade and sell those loans.
I think the loan marketplace is a super interesting one that is worth giving Lending Club a look if you’d like to move into the P2P lending space.
The design of the site is great. LendingClub is a P2P lending site. Their differentiation as a P2P site is that lenders have the opportunity to invest in instruments that are registered with the US SEC. I’m not seeing as much of a community aspect in this site as I have in others (Zopa), but I see some unique points in this one. Definitely worth checking out.
Lisa’s Review:
<font>Credit Karma</font>
Mark’s Review:
Credit Karma is a service that provides free (like really free) access to your credit score. This allows you to monitor and assess your credit and you are offered services and discounts based on your credit score.
New to Credit Karma is a ‘personalized credit simulator’ which will allow you to input various scenarios (new credit, late payment, etc) and see the impact that event would have on your credit score.
I really dig this addition to Credit Karma and believe it can really help consumers make educated decisions about what they are doing with their credit.
I’ve used Credit Karma for some months now, and it’s no secret that I adore this site. From a purely consumer standpoint, I see incredible value in Credit Karma. I’m extremely interested in knowing what my financial status is at all times, including my ability to get credit if I must. This site has made it extremely easy for me to see an up-to-date number on my credit score, which is great. I think that the advertisers they have in place are great, and the fact that members can vote on offers increases the value of this site. The cool new feature is the Credit Score Simulator – very awesome.
Lisa’s Review:
<font>CheckFree</font>
Mark’s Review: 
This former stand alone bill payment options now has integration into a FiServ PFM. Basic bill pay and PFM with useful multi function dashboard and nice charts. Ads, though relevant based on activity, look very intrusive and slow to disappear.
The cool thing about this product is it’s integration with consumer remote capture (scan in your check at home) but for me it’s not enough to overcome the generic nature of the rest of the offering.
CheckFree offers a full suite of solutions for FIs of all sizes. The site looks pretty good, and the services look nice. I like how you can see the bills when you’re looking at payment transactions. The graphics and functionality of this site are smooth. Really looks like they put a lot of effort into this. Talk about a full suite of solutions – it really is.
Lisa’s Review:
<font>MoneyAisle</font>
Mark’s Review: 
MoneyAisle is a rate auction site that is fully automated. You put it in your simple criteria and a are given the best rate out there with an option to accept the bid and move on to open the account with the bank. The full transaction is handled by the bank.
A fully automated process (including account opening) seems to be the missing piece of this puzzle to make it one that I would actually use.
Weird commentary from someone with a mic on during the presentation. Yikes. But back to the review. I’ve seen MoneyAisle in the news recently, and I think that what they’re doing is pretty great. Providing the opportunity for smaller banks to compete for your loans is great. Smaller FIs are able to bid for your business with better rates since they don’t have a massive advertising budget as some of the bigger banks do. And the site is very transparent about the entire process, which is fantastic.
Lisa’s Review:
<font>Yodlee</font>
Mark’s Review:
Along with their PFM and account aggregation, Yodlee has been making big headway in the ‘Pay Today’ space. Through a partnership with Western Union, through Yodlee can offer immediate payment processing. This is available through their SDK and I’m sure you’ll see more built on top of this in the future.
Big site, about 3.5 million users on Yodlee’s PFM site. They offer some cool billpay feature looks smooth. Really great thing is that you can pay a bill at the last minute with Yodlee, something I know many people will find useful! Only downside is that there’s a fee involved, but to get money rushed over and avoid any huge issue, it’s really worth it. The site is clean and concise.
