FinTech Connect Live, Excel, London, UK. Dec 6-7, 2017
Our score for this show is 4/5.
We visited on Dec 7th. There were plenty of visitors and a good number of exhibitors. It took us about 2 hours to visit all stands and have conversations with about 10 exhibitors. KYC and regulatory compliance was a key topic but there was a good mixture of exhibitors from smaller startups to the likes of GBG, The Bunker and Schroders.
The more interesting business (from our retail technology viewpoint) were:
Flynet – Client emulator software for legacy systems
All legacy retailers should know about Flynet. The company provides an up to date emulator for your ageing systems (and, in our view, a big quality plaster to your solution – though Flynet will not agree to this definition). Imagine your old EPOS database is working well but your other systems are being updated as you go along. Flynet let you operate your old working system together with your newer clients and other systems.
Upslide – Connect Excel & Powerpoint into a seamless combination
If you, like us, work a lot in Powerpoint, this is a godsend. Much of the challenge and annoyance with Powerpoint has been the connection with Excel. Despite both products produced by Microsoft there has been a long disconnect which has annoyed people and made the process of designing reports difficult, especially in teams where people change files regularly. Upslide makes this much easier.
Altocloud – Customer journey analytics & prediction platform
The company provide an advanced customer journey solution with predictive capabilities. Founders are ex-Cisco so the solution integrate neatly with Cisco’s contact centre products. Prediction around spend and likelihood of abandonment + spend levels to route to the best customer solution, self service or personal contact.
Factor – platform for selling your invoices
The business is just about to launch in 3 countries (Austria, Dubai and Hungary). However, we think this is an excellent business idea. Factoring has been a bane of B2B sellers with high commission rates. Perhaps this solution can bring that down to a reasonable level. While the idea is at launch stage, we hope to see this in the UK real soon. The promise is that you will be able to sell individual invoices to individual factors and not have to sign up to a long-term contract (which often is hard to get out of and add a long term additional cost to the business) with a particular factor.