My Experience At FinDevR2015

Large, stodgy banks. Creeping bureaucracy. Outdated systems. Billions of dollars at stake. Conditions have never been more perfect for tech companies to disrupt. Financial Technology (FinTech) is taking the world by storm, and I decided to plunge into the industry myself by attending FinDevR2015 thanks to ticket sponsorship from Women Who Code!

The format of this conference was pretty traditional: 20-minute presentations from financial technology companies over the course of two full days. The companies ranged from financial data APIs to payment platforms to security features to blockchain tech. The following is a recap of some of the more memorable presentations I saw:

BehavioSec:
Tap. Click. Tap. Click. Click. Did you know that how you tap or click on your keyboard is unique to you? Did you know your personal rhythms and behaviors can be used to verify your identity? BehavioSec takes your interaction patterns and analyzes it behind-the-scenes in real-time to add an additional layer of security to financial transactions without sacrificing user experience! BehavioSec demoed their solution by simply typing in account information for the genuine user and then had the CEO, Magnus Holm, try to make a fraudulent transaction by typing in the same information. Magnus’ typing style was different enough from the genuine account holder to have his attempt automatically rejected by the software.

SnoopWall:
You know those “free” 3rd party apps you download to your phone? Many of those are actually used to steal your private information from your phone! Now, SnoopWall is here to stop “mCrime.” Demonstrating a mobile attack while ensuring first that the FBI wasn’t in the audience (haha), they showed how easily personal banking information can be transmitted to hackers and several ways their AppSHIELD SDK can combat these attacks in your app code such as forcing off all background data.

Century Link:
Century Link is a huge telecom with interests across a broad spectrum of services and infrastructure. The talk at FinDevR, however, focused specifically on how to use Docker to architect an application. Why? By containerizing code using Docker, applications facilitate microservice-oriented architectures through container portability. Century Link created several open source projects to help developers use Docker. Check them out!

Blockstack.io:
What is a blockchain? Blockchains are a way for entities to share information with each other quickly, easily and instantly. Let’s take the underlying technology used in bitcoin and apply it to other services!

Currency Cloud:
Currency Cloud offers a payment engine API to help automate products with a fast, secure payment network. Rachel Nienaber, the VP of engineering and one of the few women presenters at this conference, described the brand new API solution and the engineering process of the API re-design. What is the biggest takeaway? Listen to your users, of course!

Hyperwallet:

I want to pay one freelancer in Brazil, two in India and another in Korea. Hmm. But, there is no ubiquitous way to do global payouts. Every country around the world has a different format for their bank accounts! What should I do? How do I know if they received my payment? Well, Hyperwallet takes the complexity out of the different methods and offers several payment choices and tracking to put certainty into payouts. Hyperwallet demoed several of their new RESTful payments APIs which are designed to be incredibly light and customizable for both developers and end users.

TokBox:
What is WebRTC? It’s an open-source project enabling plugin-free Real Time Communications in the browser. TokBox thinks WebRTC is the most meaningful breakthrough in web communication in the last 10 years. So…what does this mean for the financial sector? Relationship management and customer experience needs to be improved and identity management through WebRTC could solve some problems in financial services workflows. The takeaway? There are many uses and potential solutions that can be built around this protocol.

Temenos:
There are 14,000 community banks in the US and 12,000 fintechs. But, do they know about each other? Temenos connects banks to fintechs in their online marketplace. Perhaps all these fintechs I’ve recapped to you in this blog will be happy to find another distribution channel?

I am quite glad I attended and got to learn about a huge variety of solutions directly from founders and engineers. Thanks again to Women Who Code for the great opportunity!

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