The financial sector has not been adverse to technology, however the monumental push by startups in the mid-2010s to disrupt financial sectors, spurred on by governments slackening regulations, forced established players to modernise their services to meet the demands of a new generation of customers.
Everything from banking to investment to insurance has been modernised, utilising the power of the internet and mobile to increase speeds, reduce costs and improve customer service.
In 2009, fintech startups received $1.1 billion from venture capital investors. In 2020, total investment reached $44.1 billion, according to Pitchbook. While that has declined a bit in 2023 and 2024, fintech startups continue to receive large amounts of capital to pursue new ideas.
One of the key benefits of these technologies is opening up banking to more people. Robinhood’s zero fees opened the stock market to millions of Americans, NuBank is the first bank for millions of Latin Americans and China's Gen Z has skipped debit and credit for mobile payments, delivered through AliPay and WeChat Pay.
As we said at the start, this forced established financial providers to modernise or die. In the UK, the ‘Big Four’ banks have all modernised operations, in some cases bringing their entire portfolio of financial services online. In the US, insurance and lending services have been forced to lower fees and accept requests at a faster rate to keep up with newer platforms.
While the potential of these insurgent apps is limited in the US and Europe, in China and Latin America these fintech startups are the primary supplier of financial services.
In China especially, Alibaba and Tencent have overtaken the major banks as the primary supplier of payments, lending and investment. Due to the lack of financial infrastructure in China pre-mobile, Alibaba and Tencent have forwarded the country by decades in mobile payments adoption and other banking services, which are now seen as critical to the country's economy.
In this sector profile, we will highlight key statistics from each of our financial sector profiles.
Fintech App Report 2025
Want to learn more about the finance app industry? Our Fintech App report covers financials, usage, installs, demographics and benchmarking data.
- Charts: 118
- Data Points: 1855
- Apps covered: 21
