Filmmakers have Sundance. Financial tech pioneers have Finovate,a show that in a short several years has positioned itself as thego-to, be there now showcase for hot banking tech tools.

The Seattle-based company hosts multiple annual shows – in NewYork, Asia and Europe as well as San Francisco – but it's the SanFrancisco show, held in the belly of the tech beast in a trendySouth of Market hall, that remains the can't-miss show.

Also from Finovate:

• Finovate Crowns the Winners
• No Clear Winners at Finovate Day Two
• Security Tools Dominate on DayOne

This May's edition brought out 1,300 attendees – “the biggestattendance ever,” said a Finovate executive – as well as 72presenters (each of which paid in the low five figures to struttheir stuff in public, said representatives of companies that were,in fact, presenting).

Even so, an irony of Finovate is that at any moment, maybe 25%of the crowd – sometimes more – are not in the presentation hall.They are jawboning privately, often with exhibitors, often withother attendees, and they are busy swapping business cards andmaking connections.

They also are swapping stories, predictions, sometimessnark.

Read on for five things you just don't know because you weren'tat Finovate Spring 2013.

1. Google Wallet is RIP. Multiple experts,including a top analyst with a leading tech research firm, madeexactly that prediction to this reporter. The smoking gun: theouster last week of Google Wallet guru Osama Bedier.

The rest of the story is that, plainly, Google has gotten closeto zero traction with its mobile wallet, mainly because it is ononly a handful of devices, mostly Sprint phones. It also is in fewmerchants because it requires them to be NFC capable and mostretailers have opted to sit this upgrade out, at least for now.

The NFC-based Isis pilot, spearheaded by AT&T and VerizonWireless, also is said to be going no place.

But it's the whispered Google Wallet demise that dazzles becausethe well- funded tech innovator as recently as six months agoappeared to be fully backing the tools.

Wallet, said the experts, won't exactly go away. It will live onas an online payment tool – a la PayPal – and it also will havelife as a kind of P2P enabler (where money can be “attached” toGmail via Wallet).

But until the mobile wallet gets more coherence, Google iselecting to pull back to the sidelines, said the experts. Whenmight that change? Be patient. Nobody now expects mobile wallets totake off for another few years, possibly as many as five.

Google has plenty of time, said one expert. It can pull out nowand, five years from now, swoop in, buy a wallet leader and beright back in the hunt.

Next: Pay By Picture

2. Picture Pay Gaining Traction. They laughed –or at least many sneered – when Mitek CEO Jim DeBello debuted his pay a bill by snapping a picture of it atthe Money2020 show last fall, but what a difference six monthsmakes.

Buzz at Finovate around Allied Payment Network's Picture Paytool was loud and mainly positive.

The trigger is that adoption of mobile bill pay remains anemic,with many institutions privately admitting to single-digit usageamong mobile banking customers. The hurdle is that data entry, on asmall screen and a smaller keyboard, is error prone.

“Internet bill pay has terrible adoption rates,” said AlliedPayment Network CEO Ralph Marcuccilli in an interview.

“We are seeing more use of Picture Pay than of mobile bill pay,”said Robb Gaynor, CTO at Malauzai, a mobile apps developer that hasimplemented a pay-by-camera tool at several banks, with severalcredit unions in the rollout queue, said Gaynor.

The big plus: image quality on newer smart phones isspectacular. It has gotten very easy to snap an image that works,said Marcuccilli and, for those smartphone owners who often takepictures (of food, co-workers, plants, and the rest of theirmoments in life), taking a picture of a bill really is very easyand it is much faster than trying to populate a bill pay form on aphone, said Marcuccilli.

Bottom Line: DeBello – whose patents underlie the Allied Paymentand Malauzai tools – just may still get the laugh here.

Next: The Eyes Have It

3. The Jury Is Out on Biometric Logins. Theopinion is just about universal that the user name/password login –which has been around for 25 years on the Internet, perhaps longer– is hopelessly broken. From Zeus keyloggers (which capture data asit is typed in) through hacks into website login caches, there justare so many ways the privacy of that data is compromised.

That is why many Finovate attendees honestly found themselvesrooting for companies with biometric log in tools, such as EyeVerify – which uses an eye print, said to be as unique as afingerprint – and IBSS (Internet Biometric Security Systems), whichuses voice authentication as well as facial authentication.

The problem with biometrics: “They look like support nightmaresto me,” said a vice president of IT at a top 500 credit union. Heenvisioned the member with a bad cold whose voice sounds totallydifferent, or the member with irritated, blood shot eyes whose eyeprint is rejected – and exactly what would support do to help themget in?

The vendors insist that rejections – due to sore throats orhangovers, for instance – will be much rarer than worriersimagine.

But the fears persist and, interested in biometrics as creditunion IT executives were at Finovate, none told Credit UnionTimes they would recommend pulling this trigger. Biometricsjust isn't ready for prime time, at least not as far as creditunions go.

Next: FIS Does Finovate

4. FIS Wants To Be Your Mobile Main Man. TheJacksonville, Fla., tech behemoth may not have a rep for cuttingedge tech, but Doug Brown, a vice president, was at Finovate withauthentic tech hipster Chris Gardner – presently CEO of Paydiant, a mobile paymentsplatform, and a serial tech entrepreneur whose cloud-basedtechnology is powering some of FIS' mobile offerings.

The message: FIS has the mobile tech a credit union or bankneeds. For instance: Brown demoed FIS' Cardless Cash Access whichlets a consumer withdraw real money from an ATM using only asmartphone (no debit card required).

Brown's big message: the mobile wallet has become a spacefinancial institutions can and should dominate (see the GoogleWallet RIP entry above). Consumer trust in FIs may be eroding but,right now, said Brown, they still have more confidence in FIsmanaging their money transactions than they do in letting techpowerhouses (such as Apple or Google) do it.

Next: Of Micronotes and BucketLists

5. VanBeek's Bucket List. Ask Kris VanBeek,CEO of the $829 million Rye, N.Y.-based USAlliance Federal CreditUnion, why he was at Finovate doing the presentation forMicronotes, a tiny company that makes digital selling tools thatcan be integrated into websites such as USAlliance's, and he said,with refreshing candor, “Presenting here has been on my bucketlist.”

It helps that VanBeek is a big booster of the Micronotes tools –which aim to engage digital banking customers in timely, pertinentonline chat that as appropriate will trigger a phone call from ahuman rep. “With people not coming into the branch so much, weneeded another way to remind members of the products we have thatmay suit their needs. Micronotes does this in a way that I believeworks,” said VanBeek.

He indicated that the tool often results in real sales ofproducts such as car loans. “It's getting our message out to peoplewho want to hear it,” said VanBeek.

And of course he was delighted to check off that bucket listto-do.