Investment Tracker, January 1-6

The 2014 Year in FinTech Investment | The PYMNTS Innovation Investment Tracker

The 11 Things You Need To Know About FinTech Investments in 2014

• $102 Billion in financial activity was observed across a variety of investment types – VC funding, private placements, IPOs, acquisitions, etc. The biggest B2B deal was the acquisition of Concur Technologies by SAP, while the biggest FinTech deal was the IPO of National Commercial Bank.
• 39.7 percent of the activity concentrated in the Q3 (15.7 percent in the Q1, 23.8 percent in the Q2 and 20.8 percent in the Q4)
• 74 percent of the year’s activity was concentrated on the retail payments side. Of that, 60 percent was either strategic or venture capital investments. On the commercial payments side 94 percent of the investments were strategic or VC.
• Of the total amount invested, 50 percent was driven by strategic backed investments. IPOs, SPOs and private placements accounted for 23 percent of the total while venture backed investments were 12 percent of the total.
• Interestingly, more than half (51 percent) of the investments in retail payments were in the banking area for 51 percent of the total, payments with 19 percent and POS acceptance with 12 percent. Digital Wallets and payments ($79.1 M) and Prepaid ($42.8 M) reflected the least amount of investment activity.
• On the B2B/commercial side most of the investments were in payments with a third of the investments and spend management with 32 percent of the total.
• Regarding specifically to VC rounds, customer acquisition/loyalty and data analytics related to retail, shopping and commerce topped the list while grabbing $2 Billion each. Other hot areas were banking, payments, POS/payment acceptance and P2P. On the commercial side, trade finance topped the list with $584 million.
• Virtual currency investments exceeded $305.7 million, with almost all coming from VC’s. 56 percent of those amounts were first round investments.
• The most active investors included 500 Startups (22 deals), Accel Partners (18 deals), Intel (17 deals), New Enterprise Associates (15 deals), Crypto Currency Partners, Sequoia Capital, Silicon Valley Bank (14 deals each), Battery Ventures, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures (13 deals each), Atlas Venture, Bessemer Venture Partners , Google, IDG Capital Partners (11 deals each), Lightspeed Venture Partners and Mastercard (10 deals each).
• From a geographic perspective US was the most active region followed by Europe ex-Russia and Middle East. Russia saw slow investment activity during the year.
• The median investment amount was $6.4 million.

Weekly Breakdown