Today In Data: VC For Blockchain, Australia’s NPP And FinTech Funding

Today in PYMNTS data, blockchain and blockchain-adjacent startups are seeing record-breaking venture capital (VC) funding, Australia’s big banks are implementing faster payments, no-show customers are impacting industries everywhere, FinTech funding has spiked and new real-time, decision-making platforms are helping fight fraud.

Here are the numbers:

$400 million | Value of the estimated 130 deals blockchain-related firms inked in 2018. According to reports from cryptocurrency news source Cointelegraph, VC funding for blockchain and blockchain-adjacent startups — which use bitcoin, Ethereum and other virtual currencies — is on track to exceed 2017 funding in this industry.

75 percent | Portion of Australian Big Four banks that have already implemented the country’s New Payments Platform (NPP) faster payments scheme. The holdout, ANZ Bank, has declared plans to continue testing before making the long-awaited services available to its customers.

25 percent | Percentage of no-show customers who are tied to a lack of transportation, according to Susan Jepson, co-founder of Hitch Health. Any business would hit a speed bump — not to mention a revenue and profit bump — when customers don’t show up. No-show rates for the healthcare system may be as high as 30 percent, depending on the practice, translating into a $150 billion annual loss of revenue.

18 percent | Increase in FinTech funding in 2017, according to an analysis released last week, which led to $27.4 billion in industry investments. FinTech funding spiked 31 percent to $11.3 billion in the U.S. alone, and the U.K. market’s funding deals nearly quadrupled in value to $3.4 billion. The volume of deals also increased, with nearly 2,700 FinTech investment rounds closing last year.

12 to 14 | Number of months it can typically take to build out a real-time, decision-making platform to fight fraud — a less-than-swift process. DataTorrent’s Apoxi framework not only allows for building highly scalable, enterprise-hardened applications, but it can also deliver these applications significantly faster than using open-source components alone.