Dear Clients and Friends,
Our latest Fintech m&a report can be found here. It highlights m&a trends and transactions in the seven segments of the Fintech world that we follow, and sometimes lead. Please click here for our October 2017 Fintech M&A Report.
The Money20/20 conference is around the corner – October 22nd – 25th. As last year, we’ll have a strong presence at the show as will more than 500 exhibitors. Over the next five years, most of those exhibitors will be acquired, or themselves acquire, or raise capital – or fail. All but the last are tasks that we help with. If you will be there too, we would love to connect. Please email Jordan Wittbrot at jwittbrot@marlinllc.com.
The game in Fintech these days is all about fostering fast growth through product, marketing, collaboration and consolidation. Larger Fintech firms are augmenting their products and marketing through collaboration with customers and by being consolidators; while smaller Fintech firms also look to collaborate so that they can grow and then be a consolidator – or be acquired. It’s an old story, with a twist.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) recently published an interesting article on this subject. One of their conclusions is that “big tech, not Fintech, is causing the greatest disruption to banking and insurance…”. Disruptive firms have shown incumbents new ways to offer products, and those incumbents have leaned. The WEF cites Amazon, Facebook, Google and others. We would add a host of banks, insurance companies, and tech firms. As an example, Vanguard’s $47 billion under robo-advisory management now dwarfs the AUM by any of the upstarts. It’s not clear that there is a sustainable first-mover advantage in this world, at least not until you reach scale. But the early disrupters do have advantages, especially if they want to be acquired.
Strategic acquirers as well as financial sponsors are very active in this space. We advised on many significant investments into new-tech Fintech firms such as Betterment, BillingTree, OpenGamma, Think Finance, and Xignite – and we advised on many more m&a transactions for interesting disruptive firms such as Advise, Investment Metrics, iTransact, and OptionsCity. (The BillingTree deal has put us in the running as a finalist for four “Deal of The Year” awards. We’ll let you know if we win.)
