Finovate Fall: Products for investors and the "unbanked"

Here are a couple of trends I've seen at Finovate Fall, a conference in New York that focuses on financial e-solutions:

• Tools for individual investors. Personal Capital, a free new personal-finance product that debuted Tuesday, combines a lot of what we like about both Mint.com and Morningstar's Portfolio X-Ray. Your Personal Capital dashboard highlights key elements of interest, including spending and income, net worth and bill-pay reminders. But the site looks particularly compelling where it drills down deep into all your investments to analyze your asset allocation and costs. One particularly illuminating chart shows how much the investment fees you're currently paying will add up over time; you can then consider changes, and see how that affects your fees. (A Personal Capital rep says the company hopes to make money by encouraging consumers to use the services of its human registered investment advisers to fine-tune and manage their portfolios.) eToro, named for the bull, shows users how other individual investors all over the world are investing. You can then choose to copy the portfolio of anyone you admire, or they can copy you. Sounds more like eSheep to me.

• Tools for the "unbanked." A few companies are attempting to help those without bank accounts save, use credit wisely and make transactions the same as the rest of us. Through a company called Plastyc, holders of prepaid cards can log onto their card site, for example, and split their prepaid card balances into spending and savings accounts without setting up separate savings accounts. They can also automate savings, so a set amount flows from their spending account into savings, and even earn "cash back" rewards for their efforts. Those rewards translate into real dollars, equal to 6 percent annually. "It is the same as interest," says Plastyc founder Patric Peyret, "but we use the words ‘cash back' becuase our customers are used to this." The service is scheduled to debut in December.

—Tobie Stanger