A new report from findeaxble finds that Atlanta continues to rate as one of the world’s top cities for the fintech (financial technology) industry. Findexable uses real-time mapping and indexation technology to create the report, providing research and analytics on fintech firms and ecosystems around the world.
The now annual report found that – likely to no surprise – San Francisco is the top fintech city in the world, followed by London and New York. Atlanta is the fourth ranked city in the U.S., also behind Boston – and its Cambridge adjacent Innovation District – and Los Angeles. Atlanta moved up four spots on this year’s report to 15th globally, ahead of San Diego and global cities like Beijing, Moscow and Tokyo.
“A decade ago, when private fintech companies started to emerge they were easy to dismiss as an irrelevance, a pimple on the global financial services marketplace and an outpost of the tech industry. But the pandemic has shown digital financial services to be fundamental to the smooth functioning of an economy,” said Simon Harbie, CEO of findexable. “Investors have noticed. The number of fintech unicorns (a private startup valued at more than $1 billion) surged from 61 in April 2020 to 108 a year later, according to CB Insight. The combined valuation of fintechs unicorns more than doubled to US $440bn. Fintechs now represent more than 20% of total tech unicorn value, compared to just 15% a year ago.”
The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) released their Georgia fintech ecosystem report in June, highlighting the tremendous growth of the industry here last year and this spring. TAG data shows there are more than 200 fintech companies in the state as of May of this year. Nearly 40,000 people work in the industry and the revenue of just the 12 Georgia-headquartered public companies totals $37 billion.
“As we fought off COVID-19 around the world, our fintech community accelerated the move toward contactless payments and further removed friction points from our financial systems,” said Larry Williams, CEO of TAG.
Atlanta’s anchor for the industry is payment processing, an estimated of some 300 billion payments have been processed by Georgia-based companies. Globally known companies like Fiser, Equifax and NCR provide some of the backbone but dozens of companies no one outside the industry has ever heard of are attracting hundreds of millions in funding, such as the acquisition of DOSH by Cardlytics for $275 million. Last year, funding for Georgia-based fintech companies crossed $1 billion and just through May of this year, that number was at $400 million.
“As the global economies continues to recover, we anticipate the acquisition of talented companies will continue, as well as much needed capital investments throughout the fintech community,” said Sean Banks, Partner at TTV Capital, and Chair of the TAG Fintech Society.
