Fintech startups and banking veterans share trading floor on first day of summit | Arkansas Business News

Financial technology startups from across the country and as far as the Netherlands and Ireland flocked to the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock for the first-ever VenCent Fintech Summit.

Hosted by the Venture Center of Little Rock, the summit is designed to connect fintechs with potential customers — banks, mostly — but another benefit many exhibitors cited was the connections they’ve now made to fintechs doing work that complements their own.

The Simmons Bank, Arvest Bank and Discover booths were among those set up by incumbents, along with the Acxiom and Euronet booths in the middle of the show floor on the first day of the three-day event.

Euronet, a global company, has a software development division in Little Rock that employs 130 people and a new product that Matt Niles, d.director of customer solutions and products, will be touting in a breakout session Tuesday afternoon.

Smaller firms shown to be headquartered in Arkansas or have an office here were eGiftify, Data Driven Partners and Bond.ai. Egiftify provides white-label digital gifting, marketing, rewards and payment technology to businesses of all sizes and started by helping The Terrace restaurant in Little Rock, owned by the family of fintech founder Susi Barakat.

Data Driven Partners, a two-woman operation run by Mallory Van Dover and Jennifer Carlisle, focuses on providing actionable data banks and credit unions need to be efficient, competitive, launch and measure the success of their Community Reinvestment Act initiatives and reduce lending risk.

Bond.ai has an Alexa/Siri/Google Home-like system that provides customer insights to banks and answers customers’ questions about their own finances.

In addition, a few signs on the show floor directed summit attendees to a number of out-of-state startups currently enrolled in this year’s FIS Fintech Accelerator program, which is hosted by the Venture Center and sponsored by fintech giant FIS in Jacksonville, Florida. , as well as the state.

From left: Arcanum Technology of Atlanta executives Brian Finnan, Frank Brice and Brooks Brown on the show floor at the VenCent Fintech Summit in Little Rock. The company demonstrated a secure four-character password that must never be changed by the end user.

Among these was Tapcheck, with its technology for companies that allows employees to access their paychecks faster – and avoid predatory lending. Next to the stand was fraud transaction monitor Sygno and risk management firm Sardine.

Redactable, as the name suggests, aims to help banks correctly redact documents to meet compliance requirements. Neural Payments’ technology aims to allow customers from different banks to transfer money between them without having to register for the same application, such as CashApp.

More: Click here for the full list of companies in this year’s FIS Fintech Accelerator.

Many of the other startups with booths had graduated from either the fintech accelerator or the Venture Center-hosted ICBA ThinkTECH Accelerator. They included sales and marketing-focused Fi Works and Plinqit, which aims to automate consumer savings.

One of several standout technologies was nKode by Arcanum Technology of Atlanta. It demonstrated a secure four-character password that must never be changed by the end user.

There were 70 plus fintechs at the show, far too many to name each one and what they do. But their business goals ranged from automating labor-intensive functions to enabling collaboration to simplifying such complex processes as applying for a mortgage.