The CSTMR team joined the winners of the 2016 Fintech Money Madness tournament, YapStone, for a victory party featuring pizza and beer on Thursday, April 14th.

YapStone employees (Yapstoners? Hm, that can’t be right. Yappers?) at the company’s Santa Monica, CA, and Walnut Creek, CA, locations reveled in their victory over an afternoon happy hour hosted by CSTMR. Having received the most votes in the inaugural Money Madness tournament, the payment processing powerhouse defeated the likes of such fantastic fintech competitors as  Align Commerce, Dwolla, Stripe, Venmo, Prism, and Earnest.

YapStone can proudly stake claim to the very first Fintech Money Madness Championship! Congratulations!

 » Read Complete Post

YapStone Prevails Over 64 Competitors in Fintech Money Madness Tournament

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – April 8, 2016 – CSTMR (pronounced “customer”), a digital customer acquisition marketing company for fintech and financial services, announced today that YapStone has won the first annual Fintech Money Madness tournament.  YapStone is a global provider of full-stack payment solutions for global marketplaces and large vertical markets.

Modeled after the NCAA March Madness tournament, the 2016 Fintech Money Madness tournament pitted 64 fintech firms, each selected by CSTMR’s team of fintech experts, against one another in head-to-head competition for votes. The tournament was divided into 4 categories, with 16 companies in each category: Lending, Payments, Personal Finance, and “Too Cool to Categorize.”

“As one of the lesser known, yet larger companies in the Fintech Money Madness tournament,” said Tom Villante,

 » Read Complete Post

At long last, we have a winner!

Amongst a very competitive field, YapStone may seem to be a surprising champion. Perhaps not a household name (yet), YapStone earned their position at the top of the podium by taking down a string of high profile competition: Align Commerce, Dwolla, Stripe, Venmo, Prism, and finally, Earnest. The tournament stoked YapStone’s competitive fire, and if you look at the company’s success in recent years, you can see that they bring this fire to everything they do.

YapStone is an end-to-end payments platform – powering payments for global marketplaces and large vertical markets. Founded in 1999 to enable online payments for the apartment rental industry, today YapStone is not only the payments leader in the apartment rental industry,

 » Read Complete Post

Staggering $250M in graft and kickbacks uncovered in investigation of fintech community event

San Francisco, CA — April 1, 2016 — Following his long stint as FIFA president, Sepp Blatter is again embroiled in scandal as part of a small promotional tournament focused on the financial technology community. After stepping down from FIFA, Blatter joined the fintech marketing firm CSTMR to assist with their inaugural “Fintech Money Madness” tournament.

Blatter announced his resignation on Friday amidst charges that he received over $250M in kickbacks and bribes. CSTMR CEO Rory Holland was taken aback by the news when confronted by reporters outside his San Francisco office.

“He stole how much money?!? How did he get $250M? The entire contest is free and the grand prize is a pizza party and bragging rights!” said Holland.

Speaking at a news conference in Palo Alto,

 » Read Complete Post

There are only four companies left in the Money Madness tournament. Each are tackling big fintech and financial services problems in their own unique way, but all are representative of the innovation currently taking place in fintech.

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.

 » Read Complete Post

And then there were four…

We have a winner in each of our categories! With two #5 seeds and two #10 seeds, only four companies remain. Your Fintech Four are:

Lending: Earnest
Payments: Yapstone
Personal Finance: Prism
Too Cool to Categorize: Nav

Meet the Winners (+ some thoughts on each)

Earnest – Lending
Setting its sights on those younger borrowers that it says are “dramatically overcharged and mispriced by the credit system,” Earnest shuns traditional credit scoring by attempting to gauge a borrower’s ability to repay with a comprehensive view of their work history, finances and more. By connecting their financial accounts (bank, credit card, mortgage, etc.) to Earnest, the borrower is giving Earnest the ability to get a proper view of the default risk and in return the borrower saves on their student loans through lower cost refinancing.

 » Read Complete Post

That’s right, only eight fintech firms remain in the Money Madness tournament!

It’s time for head-to-head match ups in each of the 4 categories.

Payments
After knocking out #1 seeded Stripe, Yapstone hopes that its full stack payment processing prowess is enough to bring down P2P powerhouse Venmo. It’s an interesting match up of a complete payment platform for large vertical markets and marketplaces against a focused, easy-to-use person-to-person payment app. Coming at it from different ends of the payments spectrum, these companies represent the breadth of the payment industry.

Lending
Student loan refinancing rules the day in our Lending conference, with SoFi facing off against Earnest. It’s indicative of the how many student loans are out there that these two companies are not only leading in the tournament,

 » Read Complete Post

The votes are tallied! And the Stellar Sixteen starts now.

Round 2 ended with a flood of votes coming in at the last minute. Who benefitted from the late rush?

PayNearMe and Prism were the main beneficiaries…and it was enough to propel them into the Stellar Sixteen. Can their momentum be stopped? We shall see.

Most notably, #16 seed CrowdFunder busts into the round of 16 with a buzzer beater win over Plaid.

CrowdFunder gears up for a third round matchup against Nav. And from the looks of it, Nav will be attacking the rim every chance they get.

He took off from the free throw line!

The top overall vote getters through two rounds are Acorns, PayNearMe, Prism, and CreditKarma. Their opponents better take notice if they want to hang.

Here is a full rundown of the 16 teams still remaining:

Payments
Stripe
Yapstone
Venmo
PayNearMe
Lending
SoFi
Kiva
Prosper
Earnest

Too Cool
Crowdfunder
Nav
Acorns
Robinhood
PFM
Credit Karma
Level Money
SmartAsset
Prism

The Stellar Sixteen is underway.

 » Read Complete Post