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🚦 Fintech 101

Published about 1 year ago • 2 min read

Thank you for being one of the first 14,755 members and supporting PeerSignal research! Welcome back to my almost-weekly newsletter where I share data and examples to help you study B2B sales and marketing.


On Tuesday, we announced our Fintech Index (Beta) to help the SaaS and startup world find relevant resources as they rethink their fintech stack. Given the SVB news, we prioritized neobanks, business lenders, treasury providers often recommended within tech.

Considering the recent success stories, funding, and movement in fintech, we believe this sector is a useful case study for studying GTM. Here’s my LinkedIn recap of fintech categories we're tracking.

After what happened in tech and banking last week, we felt this could be a good time to survey and briefly summarize trends in the Fintech landscape.

A few months ago, we noticed early signals fintech was growing, despite the downturn.

  • Rapid growth in expense management: From virtual company cards to subscription management to company travel expense. Several unicorns have emerged from this space in the past few years – Ramp, Divvy, Coupa, Navan (formerly TripActions). Two of those examples were acquired in multibillion-dollar deals and one is expected to go public.
  • Payment and banking sectors lead fintech funding: Last year, Stripe topped the Cloud 100. Checkout.com and Gusto made the top 20. However, fintech banking funding dropping 63% in 2022 after more than doubling the previous year has taken its toll.
  • Fintechs still playing offense: Anecdotally, fintech companies have come inbound to Keyplay (our GTM SaaS product) at a higher clip than other SaaS sectors.

Then last week, the most prominent bank for VC-backed startups became insolvent and got taken into receivership by the FDIC. This put a lot of startups in crisis mode. It also gave prepared fintechs a chance to shine.

Researching the SVB situation led us down a rabbit hole. We noticed how little research there is around the fintech industry. It’s far outgrown classifications like this:

We aren’t the only ones seeing this and scratching our heads.

While research around fintech classifications may not have kept up, funding has. VC fintech deals increased at a healthy clip from 2015 to 2019. Then it got weird.

In 2020, fintech funding plateaued. The following year, funding nearly tripled only to come back to earth last year. Banking returned to pre-COVID levels in 2022, funding down 63% and 33% YoY for $9.4B across 299 deals.” Still, if you consider 2021 an outlier, Fintech jumped 53% from 2020 to 2022.

In summary, the fintech market is still growing. But like all of tech, it's not immune. Funding slowed last year but still grew significantly compared to pre-COVID norms. Some fintech companies have made cuts. Some have also announced enormous valuations post-2021. They keep surfacing to the top of our emerging market signals, not to mention Forbes' lists. The smartest ones are primed to have a big few months (we saw the calendar of a well-positioned fintech AE this week. Madness.).

According to the tech community (thank you 🙏), here are some of the best Fintech resources for tech orgs:

That brings us to present day and concludes today’s Fintech 101 class. We hope this was helpful summary. If you’re still curious about what happened in banking over the last week, Plain English does a nice job of breaking it down in, well, plain English.

Want to research Fintech tools or study the landscape. You can browse more Fintech tools in our Fintech Index (Beta).
Have a Fintech recommendation? Add it here.

Have more questions or feedback? Reply or join the conversation on LinkedIn.

I read all replies.

Best,

Adam & Camille


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👋 Hi, I'm Adam.

I'm chief analyst here at PeerSignal and CEO/co-founder of Keyplay. Join 17K+ B2B SaaS leaders who study modern GTM with my almost-weekly newsletter.

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