The last couple days at Finovate San Francisco have been fun.  The conference – focused on one-track, demo-only, 7 minute limit presentations by any financial technology company willing to spend a couple grand to hawk their wares to assembled gaggle – is getting big enough, as Brian McLoughlin pointed out, that once you skip one demo you’ve already seen, you accidentally miss a couple you should, and consequently the value erodes compared to the early days of the affair when we all paid unblinking attention to every single demo.  That said, for those of us who follow the underbanked mass market niche, there were several pretty interesting companies:

Most notably, BancBox, which provides an API layer to fintech companies looking to offer banking products.  GoalMine, about whom I’ve blogged several times before, and which offers savings and investment products “for the rest of us,” showed a very cool mobile and Facebook integration.   HelloWallet, also a Finovate recidivist, demoed a cool GUI and a bunch more goal setting tools it claims has saved many of their clients $2k each with in a limited period.  PayNearMe’s fun skit features our portfolio company Progreso Financiero and how their customers can make cash loan payments at 7-Elevens.  Kabbage, which offers advances to mom-and-pop eBay and Amazon merchants – many of whom are underbanked.  LendStreet offers recently delinquent borrowers affordable terms to sell their debt to p2p lenders in a win-win-win proposition, still early.

Not underbanked specific, but very cool companies I saw included Dwolla, Lendio, and GoldBullion.