Are we preparing a FinTech bubble?

If we come back on one of the top 2015 investment sector, the FinTech phenomenon is quite interesting. Business Insider UK published an article (one week before the London-based FinTech event) estimating that Financial Technologies sector was around 49BN USD. That amount was, according to the article, spread like the following:

  •     31,6 BN investments were done in the US;
  •     5,4 BN in the UK;
  •     4,4 BN for Europe (yes, Brexit was already a fact);
  •     3,5 BN for China and 2,2 BN for India.

And what the article also mentioned was that 25% of those 49,7BN were invested during the last five years (that's about 12,7 BN USD). But that’s from the supply side. We have a lot of products (peer-to-peer lending platforms; crowd funding; on-line broking etc.), but where are the data on the other side of the pipe? Who is actually using Fin-Tech products (and, no, your on-line banking platform is not part of it)?

The VC ecosystem is pushing investments, reports, news, columns, buzz about this new trend (but is it really? or is this more a kind of specialized software-led economic track, bringing back that good old Schumpeter rule of Creative Destruction?), and, yes, I believe we might have a bubble in here.

The adoption and consumption questions remain central, especially when we correlate the geographies and the spendings habits. Nice to read that 15% of users are concentrated in London...but what about the rest of the market? Europe, China, India are huge territories and a lot still needs to be done in order to bring those populations to a higher way of living...making them adopting a cheaper vehicle for their on-line investments....

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