Opinion: Top 9 Fintech Platforms for 2018

Global fintech investment has been on the rise over the past several years and 2018 was no exception. The global FinTech sector raised $41.7bn in the first half of 2018, overtaking last year’s record total. 

We’ve researched the fintech market, analyzed such sources as Forbes, CBInsights, and more, and found out which fintech apps attract the lion’s share of investment. For the sake of clarity, we’ve divided the fintech apps into 4 key areas of fintech development:

Investing, Wall Street

23 out of 50 top fintech startups on the Forbes Fintech 50 2018  list are investment platforms.

Investment platforms help their users to manage and allocate their financial assets (stocks, shares, mutual funds) and take well-grounded investment decisions. Also, they allow their users to check the value of their assets at a convenient place and time. These platforms often use Data Science and machine learning algorithms to make better trading decisions. A statistical model observes the news and trade results in real-time and spots patterns that can make stock prices go up or down. Based on the predictions, it can sell, hold, or buy stocks.

 

Here are top 3 investment platforms, according to Forbes:

1) Addepar

Categories	Funding	Location
Investing, Data & Analytics, Wall Street & Enterprise	$215 M	Mountain View, California

Cloud-based software that enables financial advisors to track and analyze all of a client’s assets and helps them make more informed and grounded investment decisions. Addepar opened their API and has integrated its data mining software into Citco Fund Services, Salesforce, RedBlack Software, and others. It is one of the leading investment platforms which enables collecting and aggregating data from different resources. 

 

2) Symphony 

Categories	Funding	Location
Investing, Data & Analytics, Wall Street & Enterprise	$234 M	Palo Alto, California

The investment platform enables traders and portfolio managers to securely message each other, share screens and conduct meetings without breaking compliance rules. It provides secure access to more than 100 financial applications.

 

3) Kensho 

Categories	Funding	Location
Investing, Data & Analytics, Wall Street & Enterprise	$150 M	Cambridge, Massachusetts

The platform leverages machine learning algorithms and big database of historic records to analyze and predict how a certain event-- from a natural disaster to a political event-- might make market price go up or down. Its mapping technology is now the foundation of more than a dozen unique index products.

Lending platforms 

Digital lending is one of the key directions of fintech software development.

P2P lending platforms enable fintech businesses to automate and speed up the loan decisioning process and slash costs. Machine learning is used for finding underserved borrowers and provide more accurate credit scoring, especially what concerns users with thin credit history. Machine learning algorithms allow to predict a user’s trustworthiness. Banks and insurance companies have a large number of historical consumer data, so they can use these entries to train models. Also, they can use datasets produced by large utility or telecom companies.

 

4) Kabbage

Categories	Funding	Location
Lending, Small Business, Data & Analytics	$500 M	Atlanta, Georgia

The company provides funding directly to small businesses through an automated lending platform.If loans are approved, many applicants receive money in as little as five minutes.

 

5) RateSetter

Categories	Funding	Location
Lending, Consumers, Small Businesses	$63.52	UK

Ratesetter is a peer-to-peer lending service that allows its users to lend and borrow money directly from each other according to their own interest rates. Since 2010, it has matched more than £1.6bn in P2P loans and now has over 250,000 active customers.

The website allows to invest a minimum amount of £10 and get loans up to £35,000 for individuals and up to £2m for businesses.

 

6) Credit Karma 

Categories	Funding	Location
Investing, Data & Analytics, Wall Street & Enterprise	$215 M	Mountain View, California

The lending platform provides consumers with free credit scores and credit monitoring, plus, as of 2017, free tax prep software and filing. Uses data on a consumer’s finances to make personalized recommendations for credit cards and loans that an applicant is likely to be approved for, collecting referral fees from lenders.

Blockchain platforms 

7) Coinbase

Categories	Funding	Location
Blockchain & Bitcoin, Investing, Consumers	$217 M	San Francisco, California

Coinbase is a digital currency exchange headquartered in San Francisco, California. They broker exchanges of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin with fiat currencies in around 32 countries, and bitcoin transactions and storage in 190 countries worldwide.

Payment platforms

8) Adyen

Categories	Funding	Location
Payments, Small Business, Consumers	$266 M	Amsterdam

Adyen is a global payment company that enables businesses to accept mobile, e-commerce, and point-of-sale payments. Adyen has 3,500+ customers. Adyen acts as a mediator with its payment-processing platform, used by almost all of the internet giants, including Facebook, Uber, Netflix and Spotify. It processed $90 billion in transactions last year.

 

9) Stripe 

Categories	Funding	Location
Payments, Consumers, Small Business, Wall Street & Enterprise	$450 M	San Francisco, California

Stripe enables its users to receive payments over the Internet. Stripe provides the technical, fraud prevention, and banking infrastructure required to run on-line payment systems. 

 

10) Transferwise 

Categories	Funding	Location
Payments, Consumers, Small Business	$397 M	London

TransferWise is a money transfer service. It allows to send money abroad easily and quickly while chopping costs.TransferWise estimates it helps its users to save $50 million in fees on the $2 billion in transfers executed on its platform monthly. Last year, it made international transfers available via Facebook Messenger.

 

11) Currencycloud

Categories	Funding	Location
Payments, remittances, small businesses	$61 M	London

Currencycloud is a cloud-based B2B platform that enables businesses to make remittances, convert currencies, set beneficiaries and track reports in real time using innovative Payment Engine. In 2017 GV, formerly Google Ventures, took part in a $25 million investment round in Currencycloud.

 

Summary 

Fintech is one of the hottest investment spots. We’ve selected 11 fintech apps (and divided them into categories, such as investment, payment, lending, blockchain and others) that have attracted most investment and are the most popular ones among users. Most of them leverage Data&Analytics to make accurate predictions, increase customer satisfaction, and cut costs.

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Tetiana Boichenko, marketing manager at N-iX LLC. She’s been working in technology companies for three years writing about emerging technologies like blockchain, AI/Machine Learning and their implication for business, particularly focusing on fintech domain.