The billion-dollar fintech startups list has 1 in 10 exits the market through a high valuation merger, acquisition or IPO. There is a staggering amount of fintech startups evolving every day and scaling cross borders. Venture capitalists are pouring more capital to support the next wave of scale.
Ideally, ideas originating from one location are developing and evolving elsewhere. A 2019 survey by Global Fintech Adoption suggested 96% of respondents were aware of at least one financial technology service. 75% of them had used a financial technology product or even money transfer.
Looking at the figures, Fintech has not only evolved into a mainstream space but also become hypercompetitive.
Billion Dollar Valuation Startups in Asia
The rate of cashouts and investment is also alarming. Fifteen financial technology firms in China have had exits valued at 1 billion dollar valuation, within the past three years. Data-driven studies in Asia indicate that South East Asia witnessed a record 80 deals and $700 million of investment in Q3 2019.
The figures are accelerating in Africa as well, where fintech startups doubled their volume between Q2 and Q3 of 2019. Meanwhile, the promising behavior of the space has guaranteed incumbent firms to transform their business models. In fact, these entire space seems to be piquing investor interest be it -; insurance technology, on-demand fintech services, payment processing and so on.
The leading nations with upperhand in fintech startups remained to be Hong Kong and China. While global startups in the industry raised a combined sum of $45 billion, both countries raised $26 billion. That is owing to the figures collected in 2018. The trend in the past year is evenly tremendous and we might see the amounts hit a peak this year.
Since 2017, fifteen China and Hong Kong based fintech startups have exited through a merger or an Initial Public Offering at a billion dollar plus valuation. Prior to that year there had never been any $1 billion valuation exit from those regions.
CBInsights Charts for High Valuation Fintech Exits
According to CBInsights, Zhong Insurance became the most valued exit with a whopping $11 billion dollar valuation. The leading insurance technology company came to birth following joint efforts by tech giants Ping An, Alibaba and Tencent. ZhongAn is China’s first online insurance service provider to have broken the $1.49 billion premium.
Moreover, we have Challenger banks that are directly manifesting more holistic solutions to customers. The banks saw a blockbuster 2019 after raising over $3 billion in Q3.
Note that the banks are a spectacular phenomenon for customer money, paycheck, provision of intelligent insights for financial forecasting and the best in class financial technology products. There are at least 75 challenger banks today and we expect the number to grow this year.
Qudian, an electronics retailer based in Beijing went public at a $7.9 billion valuation in 2017, following a $955 million in funding. In 2018, Carlyle and TPG Capital led a consortium of investors that bought Du Xiamon Financial Services for $4 billion.
The latest billion-dollar fintech startup in the spin of high valuation exists is OneConnect. A financial accounting management infrastructure, OneConnect went public at a $3.7 billion valuation in December. Hong Kong-based Futu Securities an online trading platform went public in March 2019 and exited with a $1 billion dollar valuation.
Source: CBINSIGHTS