Akimbo and Toopher Pitching at Finovate in New York

Two Central Texas technology companies are presenting at FinovateFall 2013 in New York today and tomorrow.
FinovateFall 2013 is a two-day showcase of cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations from startups as well as established companies.
Akimbo, based in San Antonio, presented today. Toopher, based in Austin, will present on Wednesday.
Six of the 71 companies showcasing at FinovateFall 2013 are from Texas. The others include Biometric Signature ID of Lewisville, Ignite Sales and Yseop from Dallas and Think Finance of Fort Worth.
The event at the Manhattan Center is expected to have around 1,000 banking and financial institution executives, investors, press and entrepreneurs.
Akimbo, which is based at Geekdom in San Antonio and has eight employees, has created an Akimbo Card, a Visa debit card, which allows users to share money with any other Akimbo cardholders. The accounts have primary and sub-users, which makes it easy for parents to give “allowance cards” to their kids.
On Tuesday, Toopher plans to debut its “Multifactor Authentication Platform.” Its product allows someone to log on to their bank account from their smartphone to make payments, purchases or any online action handling sensitive data.
Toopher’s mission is to create the most usable, most secure authentication platform available targeted at the financial industry.
“The key to better online transaction security is not more passwords, algorithms and cryptography,” Josh Alexander, Toopher’s co-founder and CEO said in a news release. “Effective authentication should leverage user behavior and logic to create the lowest barrier to entry to entry and the least demand to change your behavior. That’s how you get users and employees to adopt your security and enjoy your service. And that’s what Toopher does with our focus on user experience.”
Toopher offers a location-based authentication solution using a mobile phone. The company was founded in 2011 by a University of Texas PhD student and adjunct professor. It is funded by Alsop Louie and is a portfolio company of the Austin Technology Incubator.