Worldwide, more than twice as much investment was made last year in new financial technology as in the previous year. This increase is mainly the result of major deals involving three fintech companies, KPMG writes in a report about the sector.

In total, the investments in fintech rose by 114 percent last year to a value of 112 billion dollars. Ant Financial, the subsidiary of Alibaba, raised 14 billion dollars this year from lenders. In addition, the acquisition of the British payment processor Worldpay worth nearly $ 13 billion was completed last year. Finally, investor Blackstone invested 17 billion dollars in data provider Refinitiv.

A growing branch of fintech are technologies that should facilitate compliance with legislation and regulations. The investments in this tripled to 3.7 billion dollars. According to KPMG, this is partly due to new privacy laws and the new European guideline PSD2, which also allows tech companies to gain access to customer bank accounts.