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Top 10 most innovative companies in the financial sector

ZUU
Updated

Fast Company Magazine has announced The Most Innovative Companies for 2017, with the list topped by leading world financial group Goldman Sachs.

This – the tenth annual ranking – based on a survey of several thousand companies, reveals the companies with superior innovativeness and business. The top ten ranked financial companies are as follows.

 

Top ten countdown – eight new companies make the line-up

10. Forerunner Ventures

9. Visa

8. Venmo

7. Robinhood

6. Quantopian

5. Ant Financial

4. Ethereum

3. IEX

2. Digit

1. Goldman Sachs

 

Apart from Goldman Sachs and VISA, the other eight companies are new entries to the top ten


Source: Shutterstock

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Goldman Sachs launched its first online consumer finance platform Marcus in 2016, aimed at helping people get out of debt. The company has weathered a number of storms in the past, including insider trading and the financial crisis, but has started 2017 with its share price back to its pre-financial crisis level, following the Marcus launch.

Tenth-placed Forerunner Ventures is a female-lead venture capital firm that has invested heavily in e-commerce and consumer brands.

Ninth-ranked Visa is renowned as a credit card company, but in 2016 launched a number of experimental businesses, including a white-label mobile app (with a tap-to-pay feature similar to Apple Pay) and real-time payments through Visa Direct. In August 2016 it unveiled NFC Ring, which allows people to make payments simply by raising the ring-bearing finger to a reader. Visa is also researching improved domestic and international inter-bank transfers.

Venmo, in eighth position, provides a smartphone application – also called Venmo – for peer-to-peer transfers. It was acquired by PayPal in 2013. Users can now use Venmo to make purchases in other mobile apps, and it offers a speedy, fun way to send money. An added social media function, enables it also to be used for communication between friends – users can include emoji-filled descriptions of transactions, which their friends can then “like” or comment on in the app’s social feed.

Seventh-positioned Robinhood is an app-based stock brokerage that offers commission-free trading. It was founded in Palo Alto, California, in 2014. Its Robinhood app was the first finance app to win an Apple Design Award. The company has expanded into the Chinese market through a tie-up with leading Chinese search engine Baidu, enabling Chinese citizens to buy and sell US equities.

Sixth-ranked Quantopian is a crowdsourced investment management firm that enables its 100,000 users to write their own investment algorithms, and offers licensing agreements to the ones that fit its investment strategy. It plans to launch its own investment fund in 2017.

Ant Financial, in fifth place, is a financial services subsidiary of China’s Alibaba group, providing China’s leading payment service AliPay. It boasts 450 million users and processes 58% of all online payments in China. In 2016, Ant Financial acquired face-recognition verification software EyeVerify, which is likely to deliver further innovation in online payments. The company has also recently started expanding outside of China.

Fourth-ranked Ethereum is a blockchain platform – a technology in the spotlight as a fintech platform. Ethereum’s platform is expected to support innovation in financial services in the near future.

Third-positioned IEX is the thirteenth stock exchange to be launched in the US. Its aim is to counter computer-based ultra-high-frequency trading by lengthening the time between order placement and trading, thereby levelling the trading playing field.

Digit, in second position, launched an SMS chatbot in 2015. A chatbot (chat + robot) is a computer programme designed to engage in a way that convincingly mimics human interaction. Digit’s chatbot provides a financial support service that helps users economise, by analysing their bank account activity and allowing them to make automatic deposits.

The vast majority of the companies we have outlined above are fintech companies. Whilst some of these businesses remain unfamiliar territory in Japan, the fintech revolution is steadily gathering pace. We expect to see further innovations, resulting in ever more convenient and affordable financial services.

(By ZUU)

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