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He recommended an app from Cedar Falls, Iowa-based Banno called Grip that he said takes mobile banking into the future, providing comparison shopping information along with account aggregation and tradition online banking services. Members could not only find the best deal for a product like an iPad, they could also quickly review which accounts have enough funds to pay for it, and the resulting balance in each account should the member decide to make the purchase. Or decide not to buy at all.

Bank tech vendor Banno of Cedar Falls, Iowa has been selling responsive design services to community banks since last fall.

Banno, a data-based web marketing solutions provider for financial services company, also released a marketing solution that aims to increase sales in the digital channels. The solution, called Kernel, uses data and analytics to generate relevant offerings for individual customers that can be delivered through any channel, a statement by Banno released yesterday said.

"This will be the first Finovate that I'm really excited about from the staff standpoint because every division of the company is well-represented today," he said, noting that Kernel rounds out the company's offering. Banno builds websites for banks—the consulting part of its business—and sells banks a white-label mobile app, Grip.

Kernel, it seems, is a advertising delivery system that serves up ads on its banking platform based on performance metrics, such as click-through rates. The company says the delivery system gives FIs the “actionable insights to further engage customers,” which is marketing-speak for more sales. Count Kernel among the growing list of technologies aimed at making greater sense of large pools of data.

Banno, a provider of data-enriched Web and transaction marketing services for financial institutions, introduced Kernel today at FinovateSpring. Kernel powers interactions between financial institutions and customers to deliver the best product offering based on interest, across any channel. It helps financial institutions to deliver relevant content and enhance lead generation.

Banno, a solutions provider for financial institutions, implemented 15 responsive design financial institutions websites in Q1. Florida-based CBC National Bank and Iowa-based The Citizens 1st National Bank have both implemented Banno's responsive design format. A total of 80 financial institutions have implemented Banno's responsive design format since its launch in the fall of 2012.

A great example of this kind of technology is a mobile app developed by Banno. The app combines mobile banking, mobile shopping, and mobile personal financial management (PFM), and it provides real-time forecasting that replaces the manual or mental estimates people naturally make when considering an on-the-go purchase. Moreover, it also helps consumers determine the best payment method.

Wade Arnold, the boss at Cedar Falls’ technology firm Banno, has just entered a conference room on the northern edge of the company’s 10,000-square-foot office. Already, employees have the beer flowing, and Arnold, 34, will soon take his place, with a mug full of Stella Artois waiting. It’s called “Beer-spectives,” a no-holds-barred chat that lets employees compliment co-workers, praise Banno or, most critical to Arnold, tell him what he has done wrong. “It’s not about the product, it’s about the company,” Arnold said of the forum. “What did we do good? Who do you want to give a shout out to? What did we do bad? The people who show up have something to talk about.”

Banno’s new president has a bold prediction for 2013: the mobile app Grip, Banno’s flagship product, will triple its user base this year. "The coming year will see an expansion of Grip’s capabilities,” Potts told Bank Innovation. “We have a large commitment to delivering on the promise of Grip.”

#2 - The First National Bank of Allendale & Mount Carmel - In conjunction with revamping its website (built by Banno), The First National Bank pushed out its first mobile app. At launch, the app, which uses Banno's software, offers basic features like transaction viewing, as well as something that many banks' mobile apps do not yet have: the ability to aggregate other financial accounts, should a customer wish. Schrader hints that bill pay and bank transfers will come next to the mobile app's feature set.

Meanwhile, Banno and Strands are among the companies that have sensed this developing niche and are thus designing and offering pre-transaction estimating tools to banks in recent months.

Banno founder and CEO Wade Arnold has lured in a 25-year financial technology industry veteran to join his team as president. The Cedar Falls, Iowa company today announced the addition of Charles Potts, who comes to Banno after serving as a managing director at ProfitStars, a division of Jack Henry & Associates recently in the news for entering into a partnership with Arnold's company.

What would it take to make personal financial management apps more popular? Cash flow predictions and deeper spending insights, say many observers in this market, from entrepreneurs to analysts to bankers. Banno...are among the companies that have sensed this developing niche and are thus designing and offering pre-transaction estimating tools to banks in recent months.

The day after I called the expansion of Cedar Falls, Iowa startup Banno one of the Silicon Prairie's biggest stories of 2012, a banking industry publication posted an in-depth article providing insight into the mind of its founder and CEO, Wade Arnold.

This 40,000-person city is far from the tech capitals of New York and San Francisco. But it is where, with no acumen for banking at the start, Arnold transformed his company from a web design shop into one of the top financial technology outfits to watch in the coming year.

In a sign of support for technology startup Banno, established core banking vendor Jack Henry (JKHY) is partnering with it to offer joint mobile banking services. Jack Henry's ProfitStars subsidiary will offer integrated bill pay and mobile RDC through Banno's financial decision support tool, Grip. The Grip app provides financial institutions with a way to offer a PFM-like app that helps consumers decide whether to make purchases or not, without requiring integration with the bank's core system.

Why it's one to watch: Merchant-funded offers and adaptable website design will be big next year. Also, Banno is on the cusp of a partnership with a large bank.

In time for the holiday shopping season, companies - including banks -- have debuted new apps and card features that are meant to influence what and whether a consumer swipes at checkout. Banks battling for share of wallet should stay tuned to whether consumers take to these five spend management innovations.

“Startups in the Silicon Prairie have a bootstrap mentality, regardless of if they’ve raised money,” says Banno CEO Wade Arnold, pointing out what sets this region apart. “This enables a longer runway and a focused team.”

Rather than focusing on which credit card gives the best rewards, Grip's Help Me Decide feature takes into account more consumer data sources, such as the average payment made to a credit card, to help a user see what effect buying an item has on his finance before he buys it. Simply put: the interest rate could cost the consumer more than the reward.

Take Banno, for example. The Iowa-based fintech company revamped its mobile app for banks, Grip, in September. The app ties location, upcoming bills, historical spending, and other data points together to help show the end-user how buying a sofa impacts his overall financial picture before he purchases the item.

As he wrapped up a phone interview Monday afternoon, Banno CEO Wade Arnold expressed a bit of self-effacing gratitude for the coverage of his company, which, as he put it, hails from "the cornfields" of Cedar Falls, Iowa.

One key point is that while many PFMs look backward and provide solid histories for users, Banno’s aim with Grip is to help consumers make informed purchases by alerting them to the state of their finances before a purchase is made.

"Banno will unveil Grip's ability to provide insights before the transaction with its new, seamlessly integrated decision-support features and overhauled user interface."

“We work hard to guard the engineers’ time so they are not shuffled in and out of meetings,” he said, noting that meetings are generally held in the morning to leave the afternoon for engineers to build. “They are makers, and they are working hard to create. Afternoons are sacred.”

Have you ever felt frustrated at having to spread your fingers (or unpinch) and then swipe around your smartphone screen to read website content? Army Aviation Center Federal Credit Union believes it's found a way to reduce the navigation and squinting required to view content on its sites.

Banno (formerly T8 Webware) is going forward with a plan to improve its bank and credit union websites so that they scale to users' devices.

Get the headline news: mobile banking is not simply a new channel, it is a game changer – and without it, many institutions can expect to perish. “Mobile puts the bank terminal with the user. We have never before had that kind of computing power,” said Wade Arnold, CEO of Banno (formerly T8 Webware).

Banno, which grew staffing by 29 percent in 2011, recently added a Des Moines office, anticipating the addition of more than 20 employees over the next three years.

The 2,300-square-foot Des Moines, Iowa, office on the 10th floor of the Midland Building on 6th Avenue joins the company’s existing operation in Cedar Falls. Six people already are employed in the Des Moines operation, T8 said.

Today’s customers are analyzing their banking relationships and are often open to making changes. Add to that the fact that the average consumer has active banking relationships with more than three financial institutions, and changing banks is easy. Approaching customers with a timely and on-target offering for exactly what they want and need in their banking relationships may facilitate a great deal of change.

Other prominent young financial technology companies in the Silicon Prairie region include...T8 Webware, a Cedar Falls, Iowa, bank website design and software company founded in 2008.

"Banking is one of these really hard things, because you can't just hire somebody … we find it easier to just get people early and get them into the ecosystem where they get a year or two of an internship," Arnold says. "By the time they understand banking and understand how money is moved throughout the U.S.," T8 Webware can hire them, he says.

"When it comes to our interns our focus is to teach them how to program well for [Google's Android and Apple's iOS] devices," says Wade Arnold, T8's CEO. "We are consciously trying to flood the market with iOS and Android developers who are good."

Cedar Falls-based T8 Webware was named Software Company of the Year (Small/Medium).

Grip is a financial decision support tool that enables regional and community financial institutions to brand and offer an app that provides the most sought after mobile services.

Established iPhone and Android applications are available for mobile banking, but the up-front costs can be too much for a small bank. Integration with a bank's core system is another challenge. Coastal Bank is blowing past both issues and white labeling a "financial decision-support" app for iPhone and Android devices that costs 99 cents per user per month — and only if the customer uses the app in that month.

More than 40 companies and individuals are up for recognition, with several companies we've covered on Silicon Prairie News making the list of finalists, including...T8 Webware (two categories)...

T8 Webware, of Cedar Falls, Iowa, which provides online banking and personal financial management to smaller banks, has been taking a look at transactional analytics. It plans to introduce online personal financial management tools, for instance, that T8 believes can determine which of a bank's customers are most likely to go for discounts on sandwiches from the local deli, based on other food vendors they have bought similar items from before.

Reaching the top of a company would be enough for most 28-year-old executives. Not for Wade Arnold, who became chief executive officer at software developer T8 Webware in Cedar Falls at that tender age. For Arnold, a Bettendorf native who has headed up T8 Webware for more than three years, climbing is part of moving forward.

Getting your bank's site noticed by search engines is important, says Wade Arnold, CEO and founder of Cedar Falls, Iowa-based T8 Webware. Arnold defines SEO as "anything that you can do organically that increases your probability of showing up in a search across search engines."

Bank: National Grand Bank of Marblehead, Problem: Needed to enhance its website but lacked ability to update pages in-house, Solution: Engaged a new vendor that understood how to forge strong online ties to its coastal community.

One vendor, T8 Webware of Cedar Falls, Iowa, claims to dissect consumer transactions using a modified version of an algorithm gene scientists use to create new species of crops, called a Hidden Markov Model. "The algorithm yields subsequences that can be used to compare new transactions against a known result," says Wade Arnold, T8's chief executive.

Personal financial management tools are seen as nice to have – but not a need – for mobile banking. One vendor says the opposite is true: It sees financial management tools as the onramp to mobile banking.

"T8 Webware constantly uses Apple as a reference for innovation and, as an entrepreneur and CEO, I can't imaging anyone better to benchmark myself against than Steve Jobs," Arnold said.

T8 Webware chief executive Wade Arnold and product manager Ben Metz demonstrated Grip, a financial aggregation application that banks and credit unions of any size can use to offer mobile banking. Grip streams balance and transaction data from multiple financial institutions, displays account information and sends alerts so users have a holistic view of their finances.

Bank Innovation sat down with Wade Arnold, chief executive of T8, last week to see the app in action, and we were encouraged by what we saw. The goal of the new app is nothing short of letting consumers get a better “grip” on their finances...

Today, T8 Webware started off the second day of the conference by demonstrating Grip, a tool that helps consumers understand where their money is going.

Myth No. 1: Banks have an established website format that is recognized and comfortable to customers.

Even in the world of community banks, Modern Woodmen Bank is relatively small — the eight-year-old bank has about $250 million in assets and little physical presence. Since most customers see only the bank's website, it realized that it had to build and maintain something more than what its two tech staffers could handle alone.

T8 Webware on Monday announced new features for Cre8 My Card, a personalized payment card creation product.

When you walk into the HQ for T8 Webware, you know you’ve reached the heart of the Cedar Valley’s innovation district. As Wade Arnold likes to say, "Some firms are on the cutting edge, we’re at the bleeding edge."

Getting customers to use their debit cards is increasingly important to community banks. Some are offering rewards points that can be spent at local businesses. Others are paying cash-say, 5 or 10 cents-every time a customer uses the card for a purchase. Then there's Bank Iowa Corp. in West Des Moines, which is taking a more sentimental tack.

...the bank hired T8 Webware, a firm that provides Web development, management and hosting services. The new design is based on usability and the organization of marketing and functional information along demographic lines.

Lakes Area CU first stepped foot on the Internet more than eight years ago. Since then, the CU's "brochure-ware" has evolved into a Flash-driven, mobile-optimized virtual branch that soon will feature person-to-person payments...

The Minnesota-based bank hired T8 Webware, a strategic Web development, management and hosting firm to tackle a challenge faced by many institutions—mixing increased targeted Web functionality with ease of use.