China tops the list of fintech innovators, nabbing the top three spots and five of the top 10 on the 2017 Fintech 100 list.
According to KPMG International, the list, which was compiled by Fintech Innovators, a collaboration between fintech investment firm H2 Ventures and KPMG Fintech, includes the “Leading 50” fintech firms around the globe, ranked based on innovation, capital raising activity, size and reach; and the “Emerging 50,” new fintechs that are at the forefront of innovative technologies and practices and are often pursuing new business models.
The fintech movement is spreading globally, the report finds, with 29 different countries represented in the Fintech100, up from 22 countries in 2016.
And while Asia Pacific dominates the list, with 30 firms on this year’s list, the U.K. and Europe, the Middle East and Africa regions have locked up most of the Emerging 50 with 26 companies.
The U.S. has 19 companies on the full list, the most of any single country, with three of them in the top 10.
Those top 10 companies are the following:
Ant Financial – payments platform (China)
ZhongAn – online property insurance (China)
Qudian – online small consumer credit products (China)
Oscar – health insurance (U.S.)
Avant – short-term lending (U.S.)
Lufax – online financial asset trading (China)
Kreditech – loans to underbanked individuals (Germany)
Atom Bank – digital retail bank (U.K.)
JD Finance – consumer finance, crowdfunding, payments (China)
Kabbage – automated lending platform for small business (U.S.)
Lending- and payments-focused companies lead in terms of sectors, with 32 and 21 respectively on the full list; 15 companies are in transactions/capital markets and 12 are in insurtech. And disruptors are definitely leading the way, with fintechs focused on disrupting traditional models representing 73 of the Fintech100.
“Disruptive fintech companies continue to dominate the Fintech 100, representing strong interest from investors in business models and management teams that are seeking to radically change the industry paradigm,” Ian Pollari, global co-lead of KPMG Fintech, says in the report.
Pollari adds, “That said, the importance of ‘enablers’—companies working in cooperation with financial services institutions to steadily improve products and services—has remained steady. Across the 2017 list, there are 27 such enablers, working across accounting, insurance and banking.”
And money is flowing into the sector, with 12 companies on this year’s list having raised more than $100 million, according to Ben Heap, founding partner at H2 Ventures. Heap points out in the report that the successful fundraising includes “ZhongAn’s $1.5 billion raise in conjunction with its recent IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.”
“The top 10 are a strong reflection of the diversity of fintech innovation,” Heap adds in the report, continuing, “There are fintechs with lending and payment platforms, insurtech, digital banking and companies applying big data to fintech. Superior data and analytics capability notably will be a requirement to be a great financial services firm in the future, be it a traditional bank or a game changing fintech startup.”
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