Visualizing the Current Landscape of the Fintech Industry

Since the introduction of the first credit card with a magnetic stripe in 1966, financial technology has come a long way. Silicon Valley may not have birthed the term “fintech”, but it has certainly helped catapult its applications into the mainstream.

Leveraging everything from basic apps to the blockchain, the changing dynamics of fintech are creating new investment opportunities everyday, growing its appetite with every new megadeal.

Today’s graphic from Raconteur highlights the global growth of the fintech industry, the services with the most staying power, and major M&A developments of the past year as traditional institutions scramble to deal with this digital disruption.

How Fintech Levels the Playing Field

Over the past five years, digitally-enabled financial technology services have delivered convenient and cheaper access to financial services to millions of consumers.

What draws consumers towards using fintech?

• Attractive rates and fees (27%)
• Easy access and account setup (20%)
• Variety of innovative products and services (18%)
• Better service quality and product features (12%)

This new implementation of technology is democratizing financial services for the masses, a strong contrast to accessing them through traditional brick-and-mortar institutions.

How Fintech Fares Across Borders

On average, 64% of the world’s digitally active population has used at least one fintech service. But China and India surpass this benchmark by a mile—in a survey of 27,000 consumers across 27 markets, both countries demonstrated a 87% fintech adoption rate.

Russia and South Africa are in close second, with 82% adoption respectively. On the other hand, France and Japan are tied at the low end of the spectrum with only 35% fintech adoption.

The trajectory of mobile payments and digital wallets in China can help put high Asian adoption rates in perspective. Thanks to services like Alipay and WeChat, 890 million unique mobile payment users are essentially transforming China from a cash economy to a digital one.

Which Services Have Caught Consumer Attention?

Just like “Googling” is synonymous with looking up information online, the term “Venmo-ing” has become an American verb for paying someone back via a digital wallet.

That’s why it’s no surprise that money transfer and payments are by far the most rapidly growing fintech services, shooting up from 18% to 75% global adoption in just four years. Here’s how global average adoption rates differ by fintech service, across time:

Source: EY Global Fintech Adoption Index 2019

Insurtech has steadily gained traction in the market. Digital insurance solutions provide personalized and on-demand coverage plans for clients, using bots and machine learning to assess risk levels. As a result, this sub-segment has been attracting large funding rounds due to the time—and money—it helps free up for firms.

According to CapGemini, incumbents in the financial industry see wallets and mobile payments from fintech providers as the most significant offerings impacting their companies. That may be why they’re resorting to big moves to protect their business.

Deals and More Deals

Major financial institutions made some serious plays in 2019, in the way of mergers and acquisitions of fintech companies:

• FIS bought the payments processing company Worldpay for $35 billion, valuing the company at $43 billion when debt is included. (Reuters)
• The London Stock Exchange Group plans to acquire financial markets data provider Refinitiv for $27 billion, in the hopes of rivaling Bloomberg. (Reuters)
• Global Payments bought the payments processing company Total System Services for $21.5 billion, planning to provide services to over 1,300 financial institutions. (Bloomberg)
• Fiserv acquired payments processing company First Data for $22 billion—the two companies combined are a backbone of Wall Street’s financial technology. (WSJ)
• Visa purchased the payments authentication company Plaid for $5.3 billion in January 2020, in hopes of strengthening its relations with financial institutions. (CNBC)

As billions of dollars exchange hands, it’s been noted that many of these plays were made by established incumbents to curb the threat posed by fintech startups.

At the same time, however, it’s also clear that traditional institutions want to tap into what fintech startups are doing right.

Ranked: The World’s Most Downloaded Apps

From strategically finding love, to helping researchers search for extraterrestrial life—there is quite literally an app for almost anything these days.

It is therefore no surprise that apps have become one of the largest consumer ecosystems on the planet, with the global app economy expected to reach $6.3 trillion by 2021.

Today’s graphics pull data from a recent report by Sensor Tower that ranks the top 20 most downloaded apps of 2019. New entrants are rising up and threatening the dominance of more established tech companies—but can they sustain their current position on the leaderboard?

The Champions of the App Economy

According to the report, total app downloads grew to 115 billion in 2019, including almost 31 billion downloads on the App Store and 84 billion on Google Play.

Social media giant Facebook owns four out of five of 2019’s most downloaded apps: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Collectively, they boast an eye-watering 16 billion downloads—with WhatsApp holding the top spot for the fourth year running.

Growth in the short-form video category is apparent. The video creation app Likee joined this year’s ranking and sits in sixth place, with the majority of the app’s 330 million downloads coming from India.

The app lets users edit videos using a wide variety of effects, and directly competes with TikTok—a lip syncing app that entered the ranking in 2018 and now threatens WhatsApp’s position at the top of the leaderboard.

Which Apps Are Climbing the Ranks?

TikTok is the newest platform to turn its users into viral sensations, grossing $177 million in 2019. This is equal to more than five times its 2018 revenue. TikTok also bypassed Instagram in 2018, breaking Facebook’s foothold on the top four apps globally.

TikTok is owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance, the most valuable private company in the world—and 78% of TikTok’s total Q4’2019 revenue came from its native country.

Aside from several short-form video entrants, new players from other industries continue to storm up the ranks. While they don’t make the list of most downloaded apps yet, their recent success could change that.

Streaming Services

Netflix is the only streaming service to make it into the top 20 most downloaded apps, but the launch of Disney+ could potentially change that.

Despite a November launch, Disney+ became the second most popular new app of 2019. Within a month, the service generated $50 million in revenue.

To put this into context, Disney+ acquired 34% of all streaming app downloads in less than three months, or 30 million subscribers—half of Netflix’s current 60 million U.S. subscribers. That figure also surpasses Hulu and Amazon Prime’s figures for the entirety of 2019.

Gaming

With 2.4 billion people playing mobile games in 2019, gaming is also set to become a major player in the app economy.

Two popular console franchises, Call of Duty and Mario Kart, recently entered the mobile market to become two of the most successful games in the category.

The free mobile version of Call of Duty had the second best quarter of any mobile game ever, with 170 million worldwide downloads. Only Pokémon GO had a better quarter, with more than 300 million installs when it launched in 2016.

The success of these apps can be attributed to their already established consumer base, and the evident shift in more gamers moving to mobile platforms as smartphone technology and processing speeds improve.

Countries Leading the App Economy

The app economy is also being fueled by growth in emerging markets including China, India, Brazil and Russia, thanks to faster internet speeds and increasing smartphone adoption rates.

Specifically, India’s increasing digitization is driving significant growth in the market. The country witnessed nearly 5 billion app installs in the last quarter of 2019—surging ahead of the U.S. with just over 3 billion installs.

Note: As Google Play is not available in China, the country was excluded from this chart.

India’s demand could be attributed to the fact that half of its 1.3 billion population is under the age of 25. A younger, tech savvy audience has resulted in India becoming TikTok’s top market, commanding 45% of the app’s first time downloads in 2019.

The App Economy 2.0

With an explosion in user spending, and seemingly endless opportunities for innovation, the global app economy shows a tremendous amount of promise, but is still in its early days.

Consumers spent $101 billion on apps globally in 2018. This is double the size of the global sneaker market, and nearly three times the size of the oral care industry.

—Danielle Levitas, EVP of Global Marketing & Market Insights at App Annie

Rising consumer spend combined with other forms of monetization, such as advertising and mobile commerce, could soon enable the app market to surpass the trillion dollar barrier in revenue.

While many experts claimed that the app industry was dead in its tracks, it’s safe to say that those predictions are now being irrefutably challenged.