After record entries from over 30 countries and scrutiny by an independent panel of judges consisting of over 40 journalists, analysts, accelerators and VCs from around the globe, the 2015 Meffys finalists have been revealed.

The ultimate winners will be announced on October 19th 2015 in at a Gala Dinner taking place in London,  hosted by the legendary musician, beat-boxer and musical mastermind, Beardyman.

In the run up to the event we will be profiling the finalists in the different categories.  –  Today its the turn of the Innovation Award for FinTech, recognising companies who are at the forefront of implementing innovative new products and services and disrupting the status quo of the mobile financial technology industry.

Axis Bank’s Ping Pay is a social payment application which is first of its kind in the Indian market. Ping Pay lets you Send Money, Ask Money, Send Recharge and Ask Recharge using social channels like Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and SMS.  The user can add digital content like pictures, text, voice and video messages while transacting.  

No bank details are required –  to send money using Ping Pay, the user just needs to be connected to the beneficiary through any of the social channels it supports or the beneficiaries number in the senders phone book. The responsibility of entering the bank details lies with the recipient of the funds.  

With a transparent notarised ledger, Everledger provides new methods of financing and insuring diamonds, as well as combatting fraud, by providing an application for various stakeholders in the diamond pipeline. Identification of fraudulent claims helps uncover the sale of stolen valuables and can aid their recovery.

Everledger works alongside crime agencies to assist in the identification of cross border transactions, money laundering and counterfeit goods.  Everledger is a digital vault of diamonds and other luxury goods, providing an immutable ledger of transactions enabling identification and transaction verification for various stakeholders, from insurance companies to banks, recovery agents, claimants and law enforcement agencies.   

SmartBank, Santander’s mobile service designed and developed with Monitise transforms the humble bank statement into personalised nuggets of insight that help customers make better spending decisions.  With at-a-glance timelines, graphics, summaries and projections, it shows users their spending habits and patterns, many which they may never have recognised before and do surprising things with as a result (like share them on social networks).

By empowering customers with knowledge, SmartBank makes it easy for them to understand or change their financial behaviours.    SmartBank is about seeing money from the consumer perspective – where banks see outgoings, users might see they’re spending four times what they thought at Topshop. And in seeing that, they can fix it (if they want to).

Payfriendz mobile App is new to the market and leading the way that money changes hands in social situations, integrating mobile payments with a chat feature that makes it simple to ask for cash.

In the past 12 months over £1.4million P2P payments have been facilitated via Payfriendz, while the apps user base increased from 5K to 30K in the past five months. Payfriendz is changing consumer payments habits through its social approach to payments with  50% of payment requests made through the app confirmed within five minutes when a personalised message is included.

Charge2Phone (C2P) is the Philippines’ first mobile-enabled, sticker-based and credit card-linked contactless NFC payment solution. The product came about to address an emerging market dilemma, such as the Philippines: how to propagate contactless payment in a developing country with over 100% mobile penetration rate, yet less than 8% of that base with an NFC capable smartphone.  C2P NFC stickers for Smart and Sun Cellular subscribers can be used regardless of mobile phone device, empowering users to make low value, high frequency in-store purchases by just tapping the C2P sticker at any Visa PayWave terminals worldwide, eliminating the need to sign charge slips.

The C2P online experience enables the use of a user’s mobile number instead of the usual 16-digit credit card number for Internet transactions, reducing the current 14 mandatory fields at the checkout page to just four with the user’s mobile number, six-digit one-time password (OTP) sent to the user’s enrolled mobile phone, four-digit mPIN, and the three-digit CVV found at the C2P sticker. Because the process doesn’t expose the card number it is also more secure – tokenization and two-factor authentication in action.

The winners will be announced at a glittering Gala Dinner taking place on 19th October at the prestigious Rosewood Hotel – a stunning 5 star venue in the heart of the city.

Tickets are on sale now – be sure to book your VIP table for a front row seat and join the who’s who of the mobile industry at this year’s celebration.