The global Fintech industry has grown rapidly over the past few years and its profile has significantly changed. The niche start-ups that originally characterized Fintech and mostly offered a single service, have evolved into well-established and substantial financial institutions, powered by technology, and offering a wide range of services. Technology has changed the way consumers think about financial services. Fintech has redefined the customer experience standard; customers now expect a seamless digital experience, fast onboarding processes, personalized advisory services and remote loan approvals as a matter of course. Consequently, traditional financial incumbents are working hard to utilize similar technologies and keep up with the pace of innovation.
Global and local financial service providers have collaborated with startups through incubation and acceleration, Citibank and Barclays set up their innovation centers in 2011. The FinTech industry touches on trends such as payments, insurance, capital raising, investment management, training and investing, digital, analytics and many others.
Over 700 startups dealing with different aspects of fintech are estimated to be working in Israel today. They include payments solutions, business loans and credit, cybersecurity for payments, trading, and more. Israeli Fintech startups have raised more than $1.8B in total across 211 deals since 2014, excluding insuretech. Israel’s dedication to R&D is unparalleled with payment innovations such as mobile wallets and digital-only banks break the borders financially and enable users to make global payments.
One of the strong growing fintech segments is payment solutions. On top of R&D centres of foreign banks such as Barclays, Citi, HSBC, Santander and more there is a vibrant ecosystem of payment players that includes e-commerce (Paypal, Amazon) credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard) and Insurance (AXA, Sompo). Therefore, there is a variety of leading payment technologies from B2B via B2C up to B2B2C
Trends to look out for in the future of payments include mobile wallets; the rise of codes; biometric authentication; contactless payments and mobile point-of-sale.
The list includes selected start-ups in a variety of categories related to the industry, such as trading and investing, lending and financing, commerce, and payments.
The companies highlighted below display the diverse range of payment types:
Paygilant is a digital banking and payment anti-fraud company designed to provide strong fraud prevention, frictionless authentication, and user privacy.
It enables financial, e-commerce organizations to boost their revenue by enhancing the user experience, and preventing fraud before the transaction occurs. Its easy-to-integrate patented technology utilizes six proprietary intelligence sets, which work in harmony to deliver value from day one.
PayKey enables banks, telecommunications companies, and mobile wallets to offer customers the ability to initiate and complete a range of financial services, including peer-to-peer payments, balance checks, credit top-ups, and transfers, from within any mobile app, including social and messaging applications.
Sogur introduces a reserve-backed global digital currency that is supported by experts and is accepted by acclaimed financial institutions. The company operates an algorithmically governed backing reserve designed for reduced volatility.
Payoneer specializes in helping businesses transcend borders, limits, and expectations in today’s digital world. Payoneer gives businesses of all types and sizes access to new economic opportunities by enabling them to transact globally as easily as they do locally.
Melio is on a mission to keep small businesses in business by providing a smart B2B payments solution tailor-made for their needs. Melio’s digital accounts payable and receivable dashboard provides a single, integrated tool that allows small businesses to transfer and receive payments in a faster, easier way, giving oversight and control over cash flow, eliminating late payment costs, and giving businesses back valuable time.
The whole sector is undergoing a rapid transformation worldwide and, with increased investor funding, there is a lot to look to for Israel.