Has FinTech funding lost its momentum? 🤔; Long-term equity-free loans 💸; The biggest crypto hack ever?! 🤯

Good Morning FinTech, March 31

Good day Everyone,

And happy Thursday! The week is approaching an end but it seems only getting hotter in here. Hence, I invite you to explore 3 hot FinTeh stories of today:

Has FinTech funding lost its momentum? 🤔

New data 📚 I’ve briefly covered this through various lenses over the last couple of weeks, but now we have some data to back up the hypothesis.

Venture capital investing in FinTechs globally has skyrocketed in 2021 to hit several new records, according to a new annual report from PitchBook. Despite beating records, it cooled off during Q4 and so far this year, investors appear more selective about the sectors they’re favoring.

More about this 👉 Things worth knowing:

• The value of VC deals for FinTechs hit $121.6B for the year, up about 153% from $48B in 2020, per the report. The 2021 value was also greater than the past 2 years combined.

• VCs made 4,987 investments in 2021, a year-over-year (YoY) increase of around 54% from 3,232.

• Yet, it’s worth mentioning that the VC investing boom cooled off late in Q4 2021: deal value fell by 11.3% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and deal quantity, meanwhile, dropped by 9.1% QoQ.

• It seems that this softening has continued into Q1 2022 too. The funding for the 2 weeks ended March 7, 2022, dropped 63% from the prior two-week period, according to Crunchbase data. The activity in this period declined from 80 FinTechs raising nearly $3B to just 51 getting $1.1B. The global data spanned seed to late-stage rounds.

So what does this tell us about the future of FinTechs in 2022, and what financial technology upstarts can expect this year? Here’s the takeaway: