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APPs Updated: 08 Jan 2016

Atom, the eighth leading financial startup in the world according to KPMG

Atom is a mobile bank in which BBVA has a 29.5% stake. It is among the 10 most notable emerging startups in the world, according to Fintech 100, the report prepared by the consultancy KPMG in collaboration with the venture capital fund H2 Ventures.

Fintech 100 KPMG

The study highlights that this is a positive time for fintech companies, which have seen how investors are betting strongly on all of them. It calculates that financing for these startups has totaled 20 billion dollars in 2015, an increase of 66% on 2014.

Atom stands out in the report for the potential of its business and its disruptive capacity. In fact, it announces itself as the "Uber of the banking industry" and aims to cover the whole financial market in the United Kingdom through an app, without a single branch. Its lowest score is in the number of employees (Atom has around 50 employees) and the use of social networks to attract users. However, it is difficult to measure the use of social networks because the company has not yet actually begun to operate, and it is therefore not very active in its profiles.

Atom has a banking license for the UK and will begin to operate in 2016. It is in eighth place in the global ranking that identifies the most promising and disruptive projects in the banking industry. The factors used by KPMG and H2 Ventures in their ranking include the capacity to raise capital, geographic diversity, the potential of the market at which it is aimed and the "X factor", which measures the level of innovation of the business model.

The 100 startups in this report of which Atom is one (50 emerging and 50 more established companies) are prepared to transform financial services, making them more user-friendly, efficient, accessible and transparent through  technology.

The Top 10 companies in the Fintech 100 for 2015 are:

BBVA invests €63m in Atom_Logo

1. ZhongAn (China)

2. Oscar (USA)

3. Wealthfront (USA)

4. Qufenqi (China)

5. Funding Circle (UK)

6. Kreditech (Germany)

7. Avant (USA)

8. Atom Bank (UK)

9. Klarna (Sweden)

10. OurCrowd (Israel)

London, Fintech capital

The KPMG study not only points out some of the more promising enterprises in the financial world, but offers an analysis of fintechs. According to its classification, London can reasonably boast to be fintech capital, as 18% of the 100 startups that are featured in the report are from the United Kingdom.

The American continent outnumbers Europe, with 40 startups in the study, compared with 20 in Europe. Asia has 12 representatives and Australia and New Zealand 10.

The most common product categories are a good reflection of the sectors of the banking business value chain that fintechs are trying to disrupt most strongly.

The sector with most proposals highlighted in this report is payments and transactions, where 25% of all the Fintech 100 startups compete. Next are companies in the categories of lending (22%), wealth (14%) and insurance (7%).

The top three

At the head of this raft of proposals that have emerged across the world for trying to change the financial sector, KPMG has put the Chinese company ZhongAn, an online-only insurance company that was created in Shanghai from an alliance between the Alibaba group, Tencent Holdings (an online games and social networks company) and Ping An Insurance.

ZhongAn has managed to win top spot in the ranking through the use of big data applied across the whole business of insurance, from product design to risk management.

In second place is the US company Oscar, which is trying to reinvent the experience of health insurance to make it simpler and more patient-friendly.

Third is another US company: Wealthfront, which aims to make financial and tax advice services more democratic so that investment services are accessible to more people.