Meet the Fintech Four, in their own words:

Steve Gordon, Founder of Prism

The average American consumer has bills scattered throughout the month and has trouble keeping up with all of them. It’s stressful and when they do make mistakes, they pay dearly for them. Prism’s mission is to make the consumer’s life significantly better. We help consumers get a handle on their finances by consolidating their bills in one place, helping them keep on top of when and to whom payments are due, and making it easy to pay right from our app. 

We’re thrilled to have won the Fintech Money Madness tournament in Personal Finance and moved on to the Fintech Four. We have a very dedicated user base behind us.

Tom Villante, CEO of YapStone

YapStone is an end-to-end payments platform – powering payments for global marketplaces and large vertical markets.

YapStone was founded in 1999 to enable online payments for the apartment rental industry. Today, we are not only the payments leader in the apartment rental industry, we have also expanded and cemented our leadership position in adjacent vertical markets, like vacation rental, hospitality and non-profit, as well as global marketplaces.

We are very excited about our leadership position in the FinTech world. Specifically, YapStone is driving tremendous growth with with our partnerships with global marketplaces, particularly within the sharing economy. By delivering an end-to-end payments platform that manages the entire lifecycle of payment processing, including vital functions like risk, fraud, chargeback and customer service, YapStone allows marketplaces to focus on what they do best – growing their business and acquiring new customers. As a true technology partner, YapStone works directly with our marketplace clients on their product roadmaps to deliver a customized payments solution for their business – which is a rare capability in our space.

Compared to other FinTech companies, we have been flying under the radar and quietly building our business and processing significant payment volume. In fact, we are currently processing over $17B in payments annually. So, it’s nice to see our team being recognized amongst our peers for the growth and success that we’ve had.

Thanks to the CSTMR team for highlighting Yapstone and our efforts in the Money Madness tournament.

Louis Beryl, CEO of Earnest

We founded Earnest to reengineer financial services from scratch and deliver a hyper-personalized client experience using software automation, data science, and world-class client service. Currently we refinance student loans and originate personal loans, and our ultimate mission is to democratize access to high-quality financial services.

We are at the beginning stages of a massive change in people’s behavior when it comes to their financial lives. We get asked a lot about “why fintech?” or “why now?” and the simple answer is that what we’re doing hasn’t been possible previously. We’re using technology to not only drastically reduce our infrastructure costs, but also understand people much more holistically. Not only does this result in lower, fairer rates for our clients — it also results in the some of the most high-quality underwriting in the industry.

Something we really believe is that the future of finance is in real-time, connected accounts and an exceptional client experience. There’s been a lot of talk about the unbundling of banks, but I think there’s a future where some of the most successful fintech companies ultimately rebuild consumer financial services. That’s certainly what we’re trying to do — build the modern bank for the next generation.

Even though most of our real March Madness brackets at Earnest are wrong at this point, we’re holding out hope that Earnest makes it all the way!

Levi King, Co-founder & CEO of Nav

Nav is here to fuel entrepreneurship and small business success in America by creating financially fit business owners. We do this by helping business owners understand and improve their credit profiles, clarifying financing options and streamlining access to the right offers at the right time.

Small business owners are experts in what they do – whether that’s making the donuts or putting the roof on – but they often struggle to understand the operations and finance end of running a business. I started seven successful businesses before Nav and grappled with these same challenges. Now, with over 44 different types of financing available, many lenders take advantage of this confusion and offer increasingly complex or expensive lending products.

As a result, many business owners slide into high interest, convenient loans, vulnerable to whatever is marketed to them. Nav cuts through the noise, and helps business owners improve how they look to lenders and connects them to their best financing choice.

We’re stoked we advanced the final four in the Money Madness tournament. The remaining companies are all doing great things by using technology to transform and simplify our financial lives. At Nav, we’ve always felt like the scrappy underdog, and that’s who we feel like we’re working for, small business owners who get after it every day. Let’s see if the underdog can’t win this thing!

Who will go on to the Money Madness Championship? Voting ends today at 5:00pm PT.