Fintech Adoption: When Will the West Catch Up?

The floodgates of global investment for fintech startups did not open wide until after the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, the level of capital funding for these services has consistently increased.

Our friends at Fortunly attest that venture capitalists have always favored fintech startups in the West. Their counterparts in Asia Pacific have gotten just a fraction of the total investor money they pocketed, year after year.

Despite this, Asians have embraced fintech faster than anyone else in the world. China and India, the most populous nations on the planet, tallied the highest projected market adoption rate at 87%.

In third and fourth place, Russia and South Africa, countries with a combined population of about 200 million people, have 82%.

The society that can pass as a part of the West with the highest fintech adoption rate is Columbia, at 76%.

Amongst Europeans, the Dutch are the most welcoming to fintech solutions since nearly three-fourths of them are already using such services. The Irish and the British are next, both having an adoption rate of 71%.

Interestingly enough, half of the United States still won’t be using fintech by the end of 2019. Only 46% of the country is open to bank the untraditional way even if the Great Recession was triggered by the American subprime mortgage market crash.

Canada is also slow to adopt fintech. The fintech prevalence in the North American nation may be slightly better than its southern neighbor, but its estimated adoption rate of 50% for 2019 is still far below the world average of 64%.

Fortunately for the West, there is nowhere to go but up. The deluge of investment going to the coffers of American and European tech companies will likely result in accelerated adoption of fintech innovations in the coming years.

In fact, Times of Startups considered Pigzbe, a London-based fintech firm, to be one of the hottest startups that graced the CES® in 2019. Pigzbe represents a breed of startups that will expose the younger generation in the West to the beauty of fintech.

To learn about how fintech has grown in other societies, check out the infographic below!