SAN FRANCISCO — Seven minutes to tell a company's story. That'swhat presenters at Finovate, the San Francisco new technology show, get to dazzlean audience filled with investors, financial institutions, press,and just the curious.

Daunting as that sounds, 72 took up the challenge in the spring2013 edition of the show.

On day one Tuesday, 36 climbed up on the podium, mixing bignames – such as Steve Streit, the founder of Green Dot who wasthere to hype his non-bank, GoBank – as well as very littlecompanies such as P2BInvestor, whichaspires to harness crowdsourced funding to make business loans.

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But what was every bit as interesting, at least to someattendees, was who wasn't at Finovate. “There wasn't the usualparade of companies offering rewards programs, or mobile paymentscompanies,” said one Finovate regular.

Why? A theory offered by another observer was that thosecategories now are mature enough where it is put up or shut up andit has gotten tough to get traction as a genuine startup.

What did show up in numbers on day one were companies with new security tool sets – a categorythat is gaining lots of interest because, said Toby Rush, CEO ofEyeVerify, there's recognition that traditional user name–passwordlogins are broken in an era of ever-more breaches.

A Kansas City, Kan., firm, EyeVerify seeks to replacepassword-based logins with eye prints – technology that, said Rushin an interview, is as reliable as fingerprints. He also said thatfuel for this is the ever-better quality of smartphonepictures.

At AuthenticID, founder Blair Cohen said in an interview thathis identity verification tool – which draws on US Department ofHomeland Security data sets – “is 100% accurate.” Other identityverification products, said Cohen, are perhaps 70% accurate.

Other innovative login and authentication companies also climbedon the Finovate stage and, definitely, the audience listened. Inmany cases skeptically – “We haven't adopted the new technologiesbecause they still don't have the reliability we need,” said onefinancial tech reseller.

But they nonetheless listened.

Similar was true with companies that were part of a secondFinovate Day One theme, the rise of the non-bank. Streit, in aninterview, disclosed that GoBank would be rolled out nationally toall comers on July 4th, “Independence Day,” said Streit, who addedthat GoBank offers its own kind of banking independence.

He stressed that “we believe this will be profitable for us,”despite the fact that users will be able to set their own monthlyfee (in a range from zero to $9).

As for why he believes now is the time for a streamlined banksuch as GoBank – which has exactly one branch, in Utah; he insistedothers are not on the drawing board – Streit said that this is themobile era and a truly mobile banking product will gain manyusers.