This year saw 72 exhibitors and an audience of over 1200 people in London.  There were even more innovators of relevance for both SME finance and for emerging markets.  The biggest change to me was the presence of a new core of firms focused on trade and supply chain finance, which is clearly a priority area for SMEs, and which is ripe for innovation, due to the inefficiency of existing systems (and their prejudice against small ticket transactions) and the potential of new solutions to merge e-commerce with e-financing options.  The firms Invoice Sharing (www.invoicesharing.com), Taulia (www.taulia.com) and Trade River Finance (www.traderiverfinance.com) all are focused on Europe and/or USA right now, but hopefully all will see the potential in emerging markets, particularly the booming ecommerce scene in Asia. 
There was a fascinating new entrants in the "alternative scoring" sphere, Aire (www.aire.io) focusing on getting scores for thin file candidates.
Many new entrants came, as expected, in the "new channel" space, offering alternative delivery systems and even whole new banking models, alongside our old friends Quisk (www.quisk.co) which continues to refine its alternative payments offering.  mBank and Telenor/Asseco demonstrated their models for banks of the future, already working in central and southeastern europe (www.mbank.pl www.telenorbanka.rs and www.asseco.com/see) .  Mobino and Mistral Mobile (www.mistralmobile.com) offered new payments solutions that can provide the foundations for whole new services developments. LifePay (www.life-pay.ru) offers a unique payments solution and ecosystem for Russian SMEs.   FOBISS offered an artificial intelligence solution to managing cash payments in branch networks which I figure could be even more useful in agent networks (www.fobiss.com). Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (www.bendigoadelaide.com.au) unveiled their new community banking digital ecosystem solution, combining digital payments with SME loyalty programs with an additional community investment element ... this was perhaps the one I least thought would be relevant from the name, and was most pleasantly surprised about (so surprised I invited them to talk to our IFC clients the next day, where they were a big hit!).
Three crowdfunding operations caught my eye:  Streetshares (www. streetshares.com), while still focused only on the USA, is a very interesting way of getting individuals involved again in social enterprise ventures, building on affinity groups in a way that could easily transfer to emerging markets when they're ready.  Bitbond (www.bitbond.com) offers a global SME crowdfunding platform based on bitcoin, which they say allows true peer to peer to cross borders (there's much about this one I don't quite understand yet, particularly their clever way of letting one cash out of bitcoins).  Finally, InvestUp (www.investup.co) they say is the first crowdfunding "supermarket", pooling 10 leading platforms at present.  
Finally, last but certainly not least, there were the innovators offering products that help SMEs run their businesses better and help them to work better with banks.  Our old friends Bizequity (www.bizequity.com)  and topicus finance (www.topicusfinance.com) both rolled out new wrinkles, the former opening up in the UK market, and the latter an improved business lending platform that learns about each bank it works with.  Got to meet Strands for the first time (www.finance.strands.com), a very impressive group of polyglots offering both personal and business financial management solutions in digital packages for a number of leading multinational banks. 
see www.finovate.com to see the presentations of all these and other firms, as well as more information about each.
matt