By
Darya Rudz
August 17th, 2023
The annual FinTech50 list of European most prosperous fintech companies has been published with the UK obviously dominating the rundown.
The annual FinTech50 list of European financial technology (fintech) companies has been announced at a ceremony in the City of London. It is hard to ignore that the UK is definitely taking a lead.
Chosen from a long-list of over 1,500 companies across Europe, up from 1,200 last year, the Fintech50 2017 list, “features 24 businesses that are new,” Fintech50 founder Julie Lake says.
The list was firstly compiled in-house and then judged by a panel consisting of 64 leading industry representatives including Alastair Lukies, non-executive chairman of Innnovate Finance, and the U.K prime minister’s business ambassador for fintech.
The list includes U.K. challenger banks Atom and Monzo; German competitor N26; and technology providers such as Iwoca (U.K.); NetGuardians (Switzerland); Fenergo (Ireland); and Traxpay (Germany).
Mambu is also on the list. The fintech company located in Berlin has developed software-as-a-service (SaaS) core banking systems to allow its customers to run them in the cloud as a part of their bank account provision.
The OakNorth challenger bank, one of the Mambu’s customers, uses the SaaS solution to run its back-end account reconciliation and core banking accounting ledger for customers. Besides, OakNorth keeps all of its operational systems on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that serves as a data center in the cloud so that it can scale up or down flexibly as demand dictates.
“FinTechs working with banks is a powerful trend, but there is also a new generation of innovators going direct to the consumer in areas such as insurance and financial management,” Julie Lake says. “Noticeably this year, we saw an emerging evangelism for challenger brands from a very important source: their customers. They may not have (anywhere near) the customer volume of traditional providers, but they are winning hearts and minds in a style more often associated with consumer goods.”
The UK dominance in the FinTech50 list in the future is doubtful. This will mainly depend on how the final Brexit negotiations play out. The U.K.’s decision to exit the European Union can mean that it will not have access to the single European market from 2019 and will not be able to import the skilled computer scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs or technologists it needs to maintain its lead.
There is a separate “Hot Ten” list of smaller fintech startups with huge growth potential. It includes:
- aClearBank (U.K.)
- io (Luxembourg)
- Meteo Protect (France)
- Nxchange (Netherlands)
- Bud (U.K.)
- Cleo (U.K.)Datasine (U.K.)
- Deposify (Ireland)
- Post Quantum (U.K.)
- 10x Future Technologies (U.K.)
According to Julie Lake, some of the 24 new companies were launched not long ago but are already experiencing strong growth and considerable interest in their product. Unsurprisingly, these companies are often working with financial institutions in areas which could improve efficiency or customer services.
