China continues to dominate the FinTech development with its three companies place in the top-ten. Alibaba’s payments wing Ant Financial tops the KPMG FinTech100 rankings.
On Monday, November 18, the big-four auditing giant KPMG unveiled its ranking for the top 100 companies in FinTech for 2019. The report shows that the Chinese and Asia-Pacific regions have dominated the rankings.
Alibaba‘s payments wing Ant Financial topped the 2019 FinTech100 KPMG rankings. Last year in 2018, the payments and transactions companies dominated the rankings along with other companies from the insurance, wealth management, and lending sector. Another observation from the report is that Bitcoin-related companies slipped down the rankings over the last year.
However, this time we can see some new entries in the top 10, China alone has three companies on this list. Besides, we have two new companies from India, two from the United States, and one from the UK in the top ten list. Ian Pollari, Global Co-leader for KPMG’s Fintech practice and a partner with KPMG Australia said:
“Globally, we have seen a rise in companies from across Asia-Pacific (including China) which represent the top six, and seven of the top 10 fintech companies in 2019, with China again securing the most top-ten positions. In 2019, we have also seen the emergence of India as a fintech force, taking two of the top positions and with seven companies in this year’s list in total”.
In its report, KPMG also added that the FinTech100 companies raised $18 billion in funding in the last year. So far, this group of companies has secured over $70 billion in total funding.
Changes in China’s FinTech Landscape
While a majority of the FinTech companies in China were focusing on payments and transactions, there’s some notable shift in the landscape says KPMG. This year, the number of Chinese companies have emerged from the wealth and insurance sector. Chris Wang, Partner, Head of Fintech, KPMG China, said:
“As fintech development continues to go strong in China, we are seeing some changes in China’s fintech landscape. Aligned with trends we observe globally, we see an increasing number of wealth, insurance and multi-sector companies in China on the list, which indicates that technologies and innovations have spread into more financial services sectors”.
On the other hand, Hong Kong continues to be an attractive destination for FinTech development. Thanks to several steps and efforts initiated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to boost and foster FinTech growth in the region. Recently, the Hong Kong regulators have even granted Chinese tech giant Tencent a license to open a blockchain-based virtual banking system in the country.
As the FinTech continues to evolve further, it will see more institutional funding and new companies emerging in this sector.
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