Today, FinTech is one of the most promising industries of the startup world. This article will give you a short introduction and some examples in this sector.
The word “FinTech”, is a short term for financial technology. Using technology to improve financial related activities such as banking transactions are an example of this term. This industry has been in a rapid phase of growth according to the PwC global Fintech reports in 2017. Every year new technologies and innovations are implemented into FinTech companies and they keep competing with the traditional ones such as banking and finance institutions.
This rapid growth and over 20 billion dollars which was injected into this sector in the past 12 years, has brought technology-led transformation. FinTech has the hottest startups in the global ecosystem. Some of the unicorns in this sector include Stripe, which was founded in 2010 and has made a tremendous success within 7 years only, to become one of the fastest growing startups.
This company allows online businesses to accept credit card payments and connect to its API. In 2015, Stripe was valued at around 5 billion dollars.
Another success story in FinTech is Funding Circle, founded in 2010, and backed by Index Ventures. This company started in the UK as a peer-to-peer marketplace for lenders and matches SME’s to investors. Funding Circle has lent more than 1.4 billion dollars to SME’s since its inception and has funded over 20,000 businesses in the US, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands.
In Germany, we have Adyen, which is a Dutch payment processing company, founded in 2006 and it has been used by companies such as Uber, Spotify, Netflix, and EasyJet. Adyen has its valuation at around $2.3 billion, and it is considered as one of the top FinTech companies.
We also have TransferWise, a FinTech company which started from Europe’s financial capital (London) in 2011; operating in US, Canada, South America and Asia Pacific. In 2015, TransferWise was named a tech pioneer startup by WEF (World Economic Forum).
Although we mentioned a few examples in this overview, we should take note that the Chinese, Indians, and the African firms are becoming major players in this multi-billion dollar industry.
In conclusion, we encourage whoever is interested, to take the courage and exploit his or her potentials in being part of this growing industry’s success.
Stay tuned for TechRasa’s exclusive white paper report on FinTech.
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