Who are the hottest FinTech firms and Influencers around the world?

I was sent a nice list of the Top 50 FinTech firms selected by Forbes. They introduce it as follows:

Worldwide, $27.4 billion poured into fintech startups in 2017, Accenture reports, up 18% from 2016. With so much in play, it's not surprising that 22 companies are new on this, the third edition of our list. All our picks have operations, customers or impact in the U.S., even if they're not based here. Our list excludes public companies and divisions of public companies.

It is noteworthy that the list has to have an American presence, which is why only six international firms that appear on the list, namely: Adyen, The Bitfury Group, Blockchain, Quand, Shapeshift and TransferWise. I also liked the fact that they split the list into:

• The Newcomers
• Lending
• Investing
• Payments
• Personal Finance
• Blockchain And Cryptocurrency
• Wall Street And Big Data
• Real Estate And Finance

It reminded me of the FinTech50 that I judge. It produced a nice list of 50 firms, many of which are UK-based. If you don’t have time to peruse the whole list, then just checkout my summary of 2017’s results from last June.

It made me wonder if there were FinTech50 lists for other parts of the world, so I was pleased to see there is a new one starting up for Asia, run by the same guys who do the European list.

Interestingly, Asia is behind Africa on this one, as Africa already has a FinTech 100 list of the standout firms leading the way in the region. I was particularly pleased to find this list as I’m about to hop on a flight to Rwanda for Dot Finance Live, one of the largest FinTech conferences in the continent.

I couldn’t find a list for Latin America, but I could find a good overview of the region in Tech Bullion. Maybe they or another should start a FinTech 50 or 100 for this region.

Meantime, whilst looking for these lists, I was reminded of another list of influencers. There’s the FinTech influencers lists that are released regularly and I usually appear on 3 out of 4 of them. But are there regional lists? Yes, there are. Medici, previously Let’s Talk Payments, developed a nice list of American FinTech influencers, whilst there’s also the top 100 Asian influencer list, curated by Rob Findlay and Marcus Gnirck at Next Money. I like these lists as I know the guys who produce them do it with intelligence, based on their network of knowledge, and not just using Klout, an online score based upon your social media profile that ignores things like a blog.

Just to show you how flawed those lists are, I am an Innovate Finance Global Ambassador, have sat on their Advisory Board, spoken at their Global Summit and been involved with their work since inception in 2014. Onalytica, a company that claims to have software that can identify influencer relationships, produced a list of top FinTech influencers for last year’s Global Summit. Guess who wasn’t on it?