Forbes discusses the potential for continued fintech growth worldwide; cites a report from G.P. Bullhound highlighting the fintech industry's resilience following a challenging 2016; success from Ant Financial's $4.5 billion funding round and the firm's industry valuation are increasing confidence; investors also have a positive outlook on fintech in the UK with significant capital funding for Funding Circle, iZettle, Atom Bank and Monzo already announced this year and three top fintech unicorns (Funding Circle, Paysafe and Transferwise) all located in the region; the G.P. Bullhound report provides numerous other statistics supporting global fintech growth in 2017 and beyond. Source
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Dow Jones Venturesource has released its first quarter Europe Venture Capital Report; venture capital funding for the quarter was EUR2.23 billion ($2.42 billion); Atomico's Atomico Ventures IV Fund led fundraising with EUR723.30 million ($786.02 million) representing 32% of total fundraising for the quarter; business and financial services was the top funding sector with EUR877.92 million ($954.05 million) across 163 transactions; Funding Circle reported one of the top five deals in the first quarter with its funding round of EUR94.43 million ($102.62 million); by geography, the UK led fundraising with EUR970.28 million ($1.05 billion) from 150 deals and France was second with EUR398.02 million ($432.53 million) from 78 deals; the full report is available here. Source
Global fintech patents reached 9,546 in 2016 with a growth rate of 49% over the past five years; the US leads in fintech patents with 4,523 and it has twice as many fintech patents as the second ranking country, China; both startups and traditional financial services firms have been active in the patent process for new fintech technology. Source
Understanding how asset allocators view the space is something a lot of online lenders and fintech companies want to grasp; the panel at LendIt USA 2017 with asset allocators discussed their thoughts on fintech generally and the alternative yield market; traditional fixed income has become less attractive and so more investors are looking at where they can get greater yield for their investment; there is a thought that normalization of interest rate policy globally will ultimately resolve itself in an unpleasant way; alternative yield is a new asset class so selling to the big institutions has been a challenge; it really comes down to finding the right group within the institution and selling it as the right type of asset; knowing your market appetite is also key, such as in Europe where their are negative yields and public markets have been overbought by central banks; vigilance of recent lessons learned and beginning to fully understand this new asset class are two key takeaways as asset allocators begin taking a closer look toward this market. Source