Top 10: Fintech Startups
Fintech, a portmanteau of “financial technology,” is an economic industry composed of companies that use technology to make financial services more efficient.
The term ‘fintech’ can be used to refer to any business that uses technology to intensify financial services and processes.
It is one of the fastest and swiftly growing industry serving both consumers and businesses from smartphone banking and insurance to cryptocurrency and investment apps.
With fintech, companies are innovating in almost every area of finance, namely payments, loans, credit scoring and stock trading. Owing to the internet and the smartphone revolution, financial technology has grown explosively.
While “financial technology” originally meant computer technology used at the back office of banks or trading firms, it now describes a broad variety of technological interventions into personal and commercial finance including money transfers, depositing check via smartphones, credit seeking or managing personal investments.
Here are the top 10 Fintech companies of the world:
Ant Financial
Founded in 2014, Ant Financial is an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group. It is the world’s highest valued Fintech company. It originated from Alipay, the world’s leading third-party payment platform and offers services as a technology financial services payment processor.
Today, Ant Financial runs Alipay, Ant Fortune, Ant Financial Cloud, and other financial services. The company and its affiliates offer services in wealth management, credit reporting, private banking, payments, and cloud computing. Its business value was estimated at a soaring $150 billion in 2018.
SoFi
SoFi or Social Finance, Inc is an American online personal finance company based in San Francisco. It provides student loan, refinancing, mortgages, personal loans, wealth management, life insurance and investing and banking. SoFi refers to itself as “a new kind of finance company,” for taking a non-traditional approach to lending and wealth management.
SoFi was created in 2011 by four students from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The company is now a multi-billion-dollar company with more than $19 billion of loans funded and more than 900,000 members. In the former year it introduced a new product called Stock Bits, which allows consumers to buy and sell fractional shares of 50 popular stocks for as little as $1.
Avant
Formerly AvantCredit, Avant is a privately owned Chicago-based online lending platform, established in 2012, that aims to lower the costs and barriers of borrowing for middle-income consumers.
Initially structured as a mid prime lender, it now uses proprietary software to rate the credit worth of customers for unsecured personal loans and credit cards, at interest rates that range from under 10% to 36%. By May 2019, the company had more than 800,000 customers and had loaned out $6.5 billion.
Oscar
Oscar is a technology driven health insurance company, founded in 2012, based in New York. It is working towards improving the American healthcare system through IT, i.e., information technology and telemedicine.
Its objective is to provide a more transparent, faster and efficient medical claim pricing system at affordable cost. Prominent backers include Fidelity, Google Capital, and Khosla Ventures.
Khosla Ventures describes Oscar as “a new kind of health insurance company that is using technology to make insurance simple, intuitive, and human.”
Chime
Chime is a pioneering American technology neobank mobile and online banking system that offers free of cost and automatic savings accounts as well as early payday via direct deposit through a mobile app.
It has no physical branches.
In Feb 2020 it crossed over 8 million account mark on the app and is one of the fastest growing banks in the United States.
Circle
Circle is a crypto financial company whose objective is that money should be open and free, but secure. Its services include a wide selection of coins that allow users to transfer money across countries and currencies in a hassle-free manner and help them invest in new currencies.
Founded in October 2013 and based in Boston, Massachusetts, Circle’s mobile payment platform, Circle Pay, an application, allows users to hold, send, and receive traditional fiat currencies.
Venmo
Venmo is a service that facilitates payments via mobile. It is owned by PayPal. Venmo makes it simple to exchange money between friends or even accept payments as a business.
It functions in the United States. In 2018, transactions between users of the fintech app represented a total amount of more than USD 12bn.
Acorns
Acorns is an American financial technology and financial services company based in California. The company specializes in micro-investing and robo-investing. It is a savings and investment financial application that is linked to a user’s financial accounts.
It invests change from purchases in a diversified portfolio. Acorns offers other services like IRAs, debit accounts and informational content that enables users to invest automatically.
Robinhood
Robinhood is a financial services company based in California, USA. It is an investment application in the form of a mobile app that allows users to invest in stocks, ETFs and options for free from a desktop or mobile device. Robinhood has no physical locations or branch.
This Fintech aims to make investing accessible to would-be traders who cannot afford the funds required fo a traditional brokerage house.
Stripe
Stripe is an internet commerce platform and a SaaS enterprise based in California, USA that provides tools for marketplaces, subscription services, e-commerce businesses and crowdfunding platforms.
It provides payment processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce and online businesses — including Pinterest, Warby Parker, Kickstarter, Instacart and Squarespace (these companies use the platform to manage payments and structure online billing processes).
