Amid remote business operations and stay-at-home measures, the world embraced the full gamut of fintech services and solutions. To put this into perspective, the annual value of global digital transactions grew 33% in the first year of the pandemic.1 This adoption is not only still intact but is continuing to grow with transactions expected to reach $14.2 trillion by the end of 2022, 107% more than 2019’s pre-pandemic levels.2
While much of fintech’s growth is coming from its transformative impact in developed markets, an even larger piece of this growth, and a key area of future growth, is the formative nature of fintech for developing economies. From China to India to Eastern Europe and Africa, historical financial infrastructure is limited. As a result, solutions such as mobile payments do not have, for example, checking or credit card infrastructure to displace; in these locales, financial infrastructure is built, or is being built, digitally to begin with. This presents leapfrogging opportunities for emerging economies, as well as much needed solutions for the 1.7 billion people in the world without access to bank accounts, credit, and other essential financial services.3
With digital adoption set to continue around the world, from the transformative to the formative, we expect that future fintech could be more pervasive, benefitting related companies as a result.