Crypto, Embedded Payments Among Top Trends for Fintechs in 2022
- Fintech funding in private and public markets has gone through the roof in 2021.
- Global fintech funding reached $95 billion through the third quarter of 2021.
- Insider asked 8 VC investors about hottest business-to-business fintech trends to watch in 2022.
Just when it seemed the hype around fintech couldn’t get any bigger, private- and public-market investors proved it could.
Already in the first three quarters of 2021, global fintech funding reached $94.7 billion — nearly doubling the total volume invested in the segment in 2020, according to data from CB Insights.
Meanwhile, fintech in the public sphere has been red-hot. There were 724 exits in the first three quarters of 2021, compared with 575 for full-year 2020, according to CB Insights. High-profile initial public offerings included Coinbase and Robinhood, while SoFi and MoneyLion went public via
SPAC
deals.
And if you can’t beat them, buy them. That’s been the sentiment of America’s largest bank by assets, with JPMorgan snapping up fintechs in college-financial-planning service Frank, restaurant-review website The Infatuation, and digital wealth manager Nutmeg, among others. Overall M&A fintech deals in the first three quarters of 2021 notched 664, outpacing 2020’s 540 deals, according to CB Insights.
While consumer fintechs have grabbed headlines in recent years, investors are turning their gaze to behind-the-scenes fintechs as businesses inevitably look to catch up to changing consumer tastes.
Startups offering behind-the-scenes technology to other companies burst out of the gates in 2021, with venture capitalists calling business-to-business fintechs some of the hottest to watch this year. And it appears the momentum for back-end startups will only go up from here, according to a slew of fintech investors who have placed their bets on the hottest areas of B2B fintech.