The Top 15 Most Important Fintech Stories of 2015

By all accounts, 2015 was a big year for fintech.

According to Pitchbook, it looks like 2015 will close with close to $8 billion worth of venture capital invested in financial technology startups. To put that into perspective, there was $4.7 billion worth of fintech investments in 2014. With the recent announcement that Global Payments would acquire competitor, Heartland Payments, it looks like there will be close to $10 billion of M&A done in 2015, as well. New York was the top destination for investment capital, with 93 local companies landing investments throughout the year.

The top fintech stories of 2015

So, the sheer size and activity certainly warrants paying attention to the fintech space. With all the announcements and excitement around the sector, it's sometimes hard to filter out news from the noise. Based on our coverage at Tradestreaming, here's what we believe to be the top 15 most important fintech stories of 2015:

1. These 2 simple slides show just how hot Fintech is right now (Business Insider): 2015 will go down as a record year for fintech investment in terms of total dollars invested. CB Insights says the biggest areas of FinTech investment for top VCs since 2007 are the following: payments, personal finance management, lending, and bitcoin.
2. SEC Reg A+ will now let you crowdfund equity (TechCrunch): Up until this year, the true promise of equity crowdfunding hadn't been realized. The SEC has wrangled over the rules to permit the masses to invest in private companies since the JOBS Act of 2012 was passed. But that all changed this year as full-blown crowdfunding's parameters were defined by Regulation A+ and readied to go live in early of 2016.
3. Former Wall Street titans shake up banking with fintech investments (Financial Times): It's not just venture capitalists and angel investors placing their bets on fintech -- the financial industry's who's who are also investing heavily. Senior executives ranking all the way up to the CEO from firms like JP Morgan, Citigroup , Morgan Stanley , and Visa are participating in the fintech boom. They're backing some of the leading fintech firms including  Lending Club , Orchard, Transferwise, and Indiegogo.
4. Schwab Intelligent Portfolios up 37% in 3rd quarter (InvestmentNews): There was a lot of excitement around roboadvisors in 2015. These pure-play asset management firms, like Wealthfront and Betterment, attracted billions of dollars in AUM and definitely have the investment industry taking notice. But a funny thing happened this year: incumbents like Schwab launched their own automated investment advisory services. And in one fell swoop, Schwab exploded onto the scene with more AUM than any other single player in the space.
5. Banks set to boost tech spending in 2016 (American Banker): When polled, executives managing the tech budgets for financial firms are expecting to invest heavily in 2016. Anticipated increases in spending on security are particularly acute, with most executives forecasting jumps in budget allocations of at least 10%. Besides security, most bank CIOs plan to spend more next year on data analytics and mobile banking. Between 40% and 50% of executives also expect increases in budgets for compliance, online banking, "bring-your-own-device" management — to accommodate employees using their own smartphones to access corporate data — and payment software.
6. Everyone's becoming an online lender (Tradestreaming): Many of the huge investment rounds done during 2015 were essentially debt offerings to provide more dry powder for the online lenders. New players in consumer lending, small business lending, and financing like Pave, Affirm, and kabbage have all raised large lending facilities. In 2015, we saw ecommerce companies get into the game, as well. Companies like PayPal, Amazon, and Alibaba are creating financing arms to provide capital to small and medium businesses, begging the question: who's not an online lender?
7. JP Morgan working with OnDeck to speed small business loans (Bloomberg): 2015 also saw incumbent financial institutions get serious about their online lending offerings. Some, like Goldman Sachs, have decided to build their own platforms. Others, like JP Morgan, sought partners to launch their lending operations. JP Morgan inked a partnership with OnDeck to issue small-dollar loans to the bank's small business clients.
8. Experian gets hacked (Experian): On September 15, 2015, Experian discovered an unauthorized party accessed T-Mobile user data housed in an Experian server. The financial data company moved quickly to fix the problem but not before consumer records containing the name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, identification number (typically a driver’s license, military ID, or passport number) and additional information used in T-Mobile's own credit assessment were accessed. The age of hacking is here as finance companies are engaged in a continuous battle against those entities trying to breach their networks.
9. Google hears the fintech music, invests in Symphony (Tradestreaming): An industrial-grade communication tool developed and owned by a financial industry consortium, Symphony announced in 2015 it had closed a new investment round totaling over $100 million. Filling out the list of 21 finance and venture firms participating in the round was Google Inc. Symphony’s Wall Street backers are seeking to challenge communications and data firms including Bloomberg News parent, Bloomberg LP, and Thomson Reuters Corp.
10. Goldman Sachs hiring data scientists in consumer lending push (Reuters): While JP Morgan chose to partner with OnDeck to introduce its customers to online lending, Goldman Sachs decided to do it its own way. Choosing to build over buy or partner, Goldman is investing in its own online lending offering by luring over senior execs from its peers. In May, the venerable investment bank announced it had hired the head of Discover Financial's US cards division, Harit Talwar to head its online lending activities and added in senior consumer credit execs from Citi, American Express, and Lending Club.
11. 2015, The year of EMV in the US (PYMTS): As of October 1, 2015, US retailers and businesses are either ready to take chip-enabled credit cards,or they will be liable in the event of card-present card fraud if they accept transactions made with EMV cards and don’t have EMV terminals – or vice versa. As of early September, just 44 percent of large businesses (over 500 employees) were EMV-ready, while a majority of small businesses – 64 percent – were not.
12. Marketplace lending and personal finance apps - a perfect union? (Forbes): Marketplace lenders are growing like weeds and to do so, require a lot of marketing muscle. A WSJ article that was published in October of 2015 described how Lending Club and Prosper, two of the largest marketplace lenders, are turning to old school marketing techniques, like direct mailing, to acquire new borrowers. If borrowers are being acquired offline, much of the lenders are as well, too. Much of the capital on the marketplace lenders comes from institutional feeder funds. So, late in 2015, Prosper announced that it was acquiring personal finance and credit card security app, Billguard. According to company officials, the intention behind the pairing was to provide increased engagement for Prosper users with more frequent interaction with the platform.
13. Top 100 fintech influencer list published (Jay Palter): If fintech emerged as a power in its own right in 2015, so did the people who are making it happen. Thought leaders, senior finance executives, venture capitalists, fintech entrepreneurs, and industry pundits were all named to the list of top 100 fintech influencers marketing consultant, Jay Palter, published on his personal site. Drawing from data on Linkedin and Twitter, this list attempted to define not only who has the largest fintech followings, but who is truly influential among his or her peers within the industry.
14. Goldman Sachs tweets earnings (Fortune): The investment bank is cutting out the news wires when it comes to reporting its quarterly numbers. While some tech firms have been doing this for some time, Goldman Sachs is one of the first financial institutions to embrace social distribution of important financial information. The future of financial content is more open and social.
15. SEC approves plan to issue stock via Bitcoin's blockchain (Wired): The SEC approved a plan submitted by online retailer, Overstock.com, to issue new shares of its stock via Bitcoin's blockchain technology. Overstock built its technology under the aegis of a subsidiary called TØ.com, and it plans to offer this “cryptosecurity” tech as a service to other businesses, so that they too can issue stock via the blockchain. This new technology challenges the idea of what stock markets and capital markets will look like in the future.

2015 was a big year for fintech. Record amounts of investment capital flowed into the sector. New companies launched and were successful establishing partnerships with incumbent financial institutions. Lastly, changes in regulation are enabling these technology advances to make their way one step closer to becoming a reality.

With such a productive year for fintech, will 2016 be even greater?