Welcome to the 4th edition of Finch Capital's predictions, our annual thoughts highlighting what we believe one can expect in 2019 from the financial technology sector as well as looking back at how we faired with our 2018 predictions.
Globally, the Fintech market continues to gain momentum. Most notable is that the number of early stage deals (angel/seed and early VC) has stayed rather steady for some time, which is specific to this vertical, signaling that investors, despite the increases in fund size, prefer to invest in this sector at an earlier stage in financial technology.
Challenger banks dominated fundraising this year, with Revolut, Monzo and N26 leading the way in Europe. PSD2 and GDPR have been damp squibs but we expect that to change in the near future. And finally, M&A has been robust, and not surprisingly, it is payments that drives this robustness.
Notwithstanding Ant Financial’s massive $14B round in the summer - which many consider the epitome of what makes Asia the standout region to invest in Fintech, we expect VC activity in Fintech to grow steadily.
These are our 10 predictions for 2019:
- IoT: Inflection point to change supply finance and insurance
- Retail: “Free” in funds, trading and current account
- ICO: Death of utility token
- PropTech: Disruption to reach legal
- Privacy: GDPR gets 5 serious, consequences coming
- Regulation: RegTech growth kicks in as financials increasingly partner
- Payments: Consolidation continues and differentiation is needed
- SME lending: Ripe for consolidation
- Insurtech: The intelligent insurer 2.0
- Automation: AI-driven productivity and rise of the SME CFO
you can download by clicking here Finch Capital predictions
Wish you a wonderful and prosperous 2019!
