Insurance and Chinese Fintechs Strong In 2015 Says KPMG
The global economy has been a lot more stable when compared to previous years even though China’s economy has had a shakeup during the past few months and Greece has continued to struggle to pay back its huge debt to the IMF. KPMG, a leading consulting firm collaborated with H2 Ventures to release a Fintech 100 list that comprises of the top fifty fintech companies from all over the globe as well as the top 50 startup fintechs.
KPMG and H2 Ventures first released the Fintech 100 list in 2014 and this year was second edition of the list which revealed a shift in the type of companies that made the 2015 list.
The second edition of the Fintech 100 list highlighted the fact that the majority of companies featured were either insurance companies or Chinese based companies. Chinese insurance company ZongAn was rated number one on the Fintech 100 list and was testament to the fact of how fast paced the fintech market is in China and across the globe.
ZongAn wasn’t established when KPMG and H2 Ventures released the 2014 list but has experienced phenomenal growth by raising $930 million Series A [funding] and recorded a $10 billion valuation in 2015. Tony Heap, one of the founding partners of H2 ventures stated that the growth of ZongAn indicates the potential of the Chinese market and the trust investors have in Chinese companies to invest such large sums of money as they were confident of getting a return on investment. In the 2014 edition, only one Chinese company managed to make the top 50 list whereas in 2015 as many as six Chinese companies are featured in the top 50 list including Qufengqi at number four and Lufax at number eleven.
In a statement, Ian Pollari, global co-lead and KPMG Fintech partner said
The fact is that this is truly global; we’ve got 40 companies out of the US. Last year there was a high proportion from the northern hemisphere. We’ve now got 22 in APAC, which points to the balancing and the fact that fintech is a global dynamic; it’s not just simply that all of the growth is going to come out of Silicon Valley. Clearly there is a real stronghold for tech growth and entrepreneurship, and fintech in a far more distributed way.
