Technology Companies

By Scott Hess, Vice President of User Experience, Consulting and Innovation and Matt Wilcox, Senior Vice President, Marketing Strategy and Innovation at Fiserv

This Harvard Business School White Paper is laid out in three major sections:
Chapters 1 and 2 describe the importance of small business to the U.S. economy and lay out the current state of access to credit for small businesses from traditional banks.

This analyst note provides an update on the current state of the fintech market as well as what key advances in business models, technology and regulation will truly transform the segment as a whole. The note breaks down challenges that still face key fintech segments and offers strategic solutions and our views on each subsector. Trends in venture capital financing of fintech startups are also addressed.

Note highlights include:

Optimism seems to be abound, economically at least, with a businessman heading for the White House. The Dow has risen and, despite vocal opposition from opponents on many of his decisions, President-elect Trump has been announcing job creation measures even before he has taken the oath of office.

Analysts continue to flesh out their predictions for payments and FinTech in 2017, but one can never truly know the exact direction an industry will take. The B2B payments space is positioned to go in multiple directions as regulations and faster payments initiatives offer new opportunities in speed and efficiency, as technological innovation improves corporate payments and cash management and as market conditions, like globalization, introduce new demands and pressures for businesses and their financial services providers.

Steven Renwick, CEO of business finance firm Satago, explains how a new breed of FinTechs has emerged to transform the SME funding landscape.

Disruptive innovation designed to break the stranglehold of dominant business models shows no signs of abating. Netflix, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb are the doyens of the on-demand economy as we know it today, inspiring entire generations of technology-driven businesses to challenge established models and strategies.

KPMG, along with AltFi data, has published a new report on alternative lending in Europe. KPMG also sourced data from the most recent Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance report. The document, entitled Alternative Lending Market Trends in Continental Europe 2016, provides an interesting snapshot of online lending beyond the UK.

Japan’s nascent fintech space is growing, but compared to much of Asia, most Japanese institutions have been late movers in adopting the emerging technology.

Fintech became a buzzword in Japan just this year. In 2014, Japanese investments accounted for only 0.4 percent of global fintech investments. In 2015, they doubled, but still hit only $142 million.

This study follows-up on our 2015 study on “Recent Trends in Banking in sub-Saharan Africa - From Financing to Investment”. Against the background of a rapidly evolving context for the SSA banking industry, the Economics Department of the European Investment Bank (EIB) has coordinated this volume, which combines in-house expertise on the region with contributions from leading specialists from the local financial sector and from international financial institutions and research centres. 

Analysts are no longer confident that alternative players will disrupt the SME lending space as once thought. Still, others remain sure the sector is doing just fine. Amid all the chatter, PYMNTS takes a look at cold, hard data to assess whether alternative SME finance is in trouble or not.