FinTech Startups Mapped

Financial technology is literally where the money is in today’s startup landscape.

Known in startup circles as FinTech, the industry’s service ranges from crowdfunding to cryptocurrency, from mobile payments to the motor insurance ‘black box’ recorder. An entrepreneur who can pin a killer app to the international flow of money is always a welcome guest to investors.

But while some of these technologies are used around the world, is there somewhere in particular they come from?

BusinessFinancing.co.uk analysed 10,000 FinTech startups using business data platform Crunchbase as our source. We found out who these startups are, what they do, and how much funding they’ve raised.

Key Findings

• The United States is the runaway capital of FinTech, home to 1,491 start-ups with a combined funding haul of $58.8bn.
• The UK has 482 FinTech startups with a combined $18.7bn in funding, making it in the FinTech capital of Europe.
• Ant Financial in China is the world’s highest-valued FinTech startup, with $22bn raised.
• China is home to the three most highly valued FinTech startups in the world.
• The UK’s Greensill Capital the most highly valued FinTech startup in Europe, with $1.7bn.

Where Are The FinTech Startup HotSpots?

The first two tabs on our interactive map show the number of start-ups and the amount of funding raised by the top startup in each city. Click the third tab to filter the map by sub-sector (e.g., Finance, Lifestyle, Transport, etc), and see the number of startups in each sub-sector. You can tap or scroll to zoom in and out of the map.

The FinTech Startup with the Most Funding in Every Country

This map shows just one FinTech startup in each country: the one that has raised the most amount of funding from investors. The darker the shade of blue, the more investment that country’s biggest startup has raised.

Click here to see the map in full size

The top FinTech company in each continent belongs to a different sector. SoFi in the US is North America’s highest-valued outfit, and it’s a personal finance company. OPay in Nigeria, Africa, is a $170-million mobile payments platform. Riskified is a Middle Eastern risk management firm, based in Israel and backed with $228m.

Europe’s top FinTech startup is Greensill Capital in the UK’s lending sub-sector. The company facilitates business funding by bringing forward its clients’ supplier payments – just one of founder Lex Greensill’s controversial/visionary techniques. Greensill has raised $1,705,000,000 in investment thanks largely to key investor SoftBank in Japan.

How Do Countries Compare When it Comes to the FinTech Landscape?

Our interactive table below shows every country’s ‘vital statistics’ at a glance. Use the arrows at the top to sort into alphabetical order, by continent, by the combined funding raised by every FinTech startup in each country, or by the funding raised by each country’s most-funded startup.

Sort the table by ‘Number of FinTech Startups,’ and you’ll see a mix of traditional economic giants and BRIC nations rise to the top. The US and UK, India, China, Canada, Singapore, and Germany each have more than active 100 FinTech startups, and Brazil is not far behind.

However, Sweden, France, and Hong Kong all leap up the table when influence is measured by the total funding raised in each country rather than the number of startups. There is a total of over $2bn invested in the collective FinTech startups of each of these countries.

Facilitating the World’s Financial Habits

Money is power: find an attractive new way to control how people spend, save, raise, invest, or donate their money, and you could be quids in. But with this power comes grave responsibility, not just to investors but to the individuals and businesses who trust their economic welfare to emerging FinTech startups.

New models of lending and spending attempt to ‘disrupt’ the unwelcome finance industry practices of yesteryear. But FinTech founders and customers alike need to beware of the hype and the shiny digital box the service comes in – wherever in the world they make their money.

METHODOLOGY & SOURCES

To create this map, we extracted information from Crunchbase on the 10,000+ companies that were identified as FinTech. Of these 10,000 companies, 4,000 had yet to go public or be acquired and were classed as being in their ‘startup’ phase. These were the companies that we included in our map. For each of the 4,000+ startups, we gathered their name, location, industry, and the total amount of funding raised. These companies fell into 248 different industries, which we then grouped into 15 sectors using the definitions outlined by the International Labour Organization as a starting point.

The data gathering was undertaken in June 2020. For the full research, visit bit.ly/FinTechStartupsMapped.

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