How to join the network
Our team has been actively investing in fintech for the past two years. In addition to reading pitches from hundreds of companies and meeting with dozens, half of our team has worked in the finance sector in previous careers. SparkLabs Global has invested in 13 fintech companies from the U.S., U.K. and Sweden, and we were the only follow-on fund for the inaugural cohort of the Barclays Accelerator program.
With this accumulated knowledge, we decided to create an easy to read overview for others to get up to speed on how innovation and technology will disrupt the financial sector. Here is our full report ; the following is a summary of what we’ve learned so far.
There has been a flurry of activity over the past several years. From startups to established technology ventures such as Alibaba and PayPal, companies are working to disrupt and capture market share from traditional financial institutions — which are truly giants compared with the upstarts of today. In China, and Asia in general, mobile payment penetration is ahead of the rest of the world. The third-party mobile payment market in China increased 69.7 percent in 2015, to $1.5 trillion by GMV, with Alipay (Alibaba) capturing 68.4 percent of the market, followed by Tenpay’s (Tencent) 20.6 percent.
Looking at the wealth management industry, you can see the wide chasm between traditional institutions and the startups trying to disrupt them. Compare assets under management (AUM) of leading startups in wealth management, such as Betterment ($3 billion) and Wealthfront ($2.6 billion), with established wealth management groups such as Bank of America ($1.12 trillion) or Morgan Stanley ($986.7 billion):
> Bank of America Global Wealth ($1.12 trillion AUM)
Morgan Stanley Wealth ($986.7 billion AUM)
JP Morgan ($617.0 billion AUM)> Betterment ($3 billion AUM) Wealthfront […]
