Brexit has created uncertainty. How does the UK maintain its lead? 2017 is the year when UK FinTech must go mainstream.
Uncertainty is slowing down funding, which in turn is leading to a slowdown in innovation. The threat is that London could be overtaken by non-UK FinTech hubs.
“Tech funding is officially slowing down,” confirms Katia Lang, co-founder at Disrupts Media and FintNews.com. “In the Q3, European start-ups suffered a sharp decline in funding, raising €2.1 bln from venture capital funds with 464 deals, a drop of a third from the Q2, and 39 percent lower compared with the same period last year,” according to Dow Jones VentureSource.
Brexit is not to blame
At the same time, research group PitchBook recorded a 38 percent year-on-year decline in venture capital investment in European start-ups and a 31 percent drop in deals completed in the third quarter.
“Investors' opinion is divided,” says Lang. “Some investors point to the EU referendum in June to explain the drop-off, some of them, however, insist Brexit is not to blame for the funding drop, saying the downturn is instead simply part of a wider global correction in an inflated market.”
According to Lang, the overall slowdown in funding is due to more cautious investing. It directly affects research and development. She points out:
“Since innovation is never a single event but a continuous development, even the slightest change in funding and supplying R&D leads to fluctuations and disruptions.”
Financial innovations must go mainstream
All the innovations of the last four years now need to be taken to market. These include the challenger banks, money transfer companies, insurance challengers and investment challengers. All these and more are ready to be delivered to the UK B2B and B2C market. 2017 is the year to do it.
“We all know that it is tough to get consumers to adopt innovations — and it’s getting harder all the time,” explains Veronika Bondareva, CTO at Disrupts Media and FintNews.com. “Where millennials are happy to use new payment technologies, smart cards, banking apps and wearables, the rest of consumers are still hard to get.”
The efficiency of old marketing tools such as advertising, promotions and digital marketing has declined. It is more difficult for innovators to rise above the din of information from competing sources.
“The price for customers acquisition and retention will only get higher, the process more complex,” continues Bondareva. “Executives now need to rethink the way they bring innovations to the market to make them a mass medium.”
The future of all financial services
With FinTech being the future of all financial services, the value brought to the sector by making FinTech mainstream is literally billions of pounds a month, and media is an important partner here.
Lang underlines that the FinTech sector needs a media company that understands it, and also understands how to re-engineer old commercial models and ensure the proliferation of technologies in an ever increasing radius of influence.
Truly, these are the FinTech times.
“Our digital news agency FintNews.com combines journalistic quality content with technological efficiencies,” assures Bondareva. “We deliver news from our FinTech clients directly into an ever expanding media network. It’s a classic win-win-win technology success story.”
This article is provided by our partners FintNews.com, a digital news agency specifically for finance and technology companies.