Methodology
Disclaimer: the Cambridge Fintech Ecosystem Atlas does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal information. The Ecosystem Atlas is a public data repository based on pooled data, collected, and validated to the best of the research team’s ability, through methods detailed herein. The University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, its affiliates, and any of the participating analysts do not accept any responsibility or liability regarding the aggregated information presented. The data provided on this website is for informative purposes only; we do recommend all information to be individually verified for the nature of its use.
Summary
The Cambridge Fintech Ecosystem Atlas is an online interactive resource that allows users to interact with a visual representation of the fintech industry and its evolution.
The objective of the Cambridge Fintech Ecosystem Atlas is to offer industry actors, regulators, researchers, and the public access to longitudinal and historical data related to the industry. The Atlas aims to become a collaborative platform whereby users and industry participants can actively review, update, and share data.
The Atlas has been developed to systematically identify, classify and visualize fintech entities. Although definitions of fintech differ, the working definition of fintech applied in the Cambridge Fintech Ecosystem Atlas refers to entities that use digital technology to provide or to enable the provision of financial services. Where these technologies have been applied by entities and have enabled new or evolved business models, instruments, products, channels or systems they have been included in the Atlas.
Incumbent financial services firms have been excluded, even if they use new technologies or software to provide (or facilitate the provision of) financial services. All the fintech entities included in the Atlas must have been in operation for at least one year and must show a concrete digital presence. Fintech that are not operational (inactive) are also included in the Atlas.
The first version of the public repository is based on a dataset of over 2,000 entities employing both manual and automatic data extraction processes and techniques.
Classification System
The CCAF has developed a comprehensive classification system to classify, in a consistent manner, organisations by business models. The first iteration of the Cambridge Fintech Ecosystem Atlas covers 14 market segments, subdivided into 63 subsegments, and 118 categories. The structure of the classification system is hierarchical and built on an activity-oriented conceptual framework that groups entities based on services offered directly to clients/users.
Table 1: Overview of CCAF fintech classification system
Vertical (segment) | Level 1 (subsegment) | Level 2 (category) | Definition |
Digital Lending | Balance Sheet Lending | Balance Sheet Business Lending | The platform entity provides an unsecured or secured loan directly to the business borrower |
Balance Sheet Property Lending | The platform entity provides a loan, secured against a property, directly to a consumer or business borrower | ||
Balance Sheet Consumer Lending | The platform entity provides an unsecured or secured loan directly to a consumer borrower | ||
P2P / Marketplace Lending | P2P / Marketplace Business Lending | Individuals and/or institutional funders provide a loan to a business borrower | |
P2P / Marketplace Property Lending | Individuals and/or institutional funders provide a loan, secured against a property, to a consumer or business borrower | ||
P2P / Marketplace Consumer Lending | Individuals and/or institutional funders provide a loan to a consumer borrower | ||
Debt-Based Securities | Debt-Based Securities | Individuals and/or institutional funders purchase debt-based securities, typically a bond or debenture, at a fixed interest rate | |
Mini-Bonds | Individuals or institutions purchase securities from companies in the form of an unsecured bond which is ‘mini’ because the issue size is much smaller than the minimum issue amount needed for a bond issued in institutional capital markets. | ||
Invoice Trading | Individuals and/or institutional funders purchase invoices or receivables from a business at a discount | ||
Crowd-Led Microfinance | Interests and/or other profits are re-invested (forgoing the interest by donating) or provides microcredit at lower rates. | ||
Customer Cash-Advance | A buy now/pay later payment facilitator or Store Credit solution, typically interest bearing | ||
Merchant Cash-Advance | A merchant cash advance provided via an electronic platform, typically with a retail and/or institutional investor counterpart receiving fixed payments or future payments based on sales. | ||
Digital Capital Raising | Investment-Based Crowdfunding | Equity-Based Crowdfunding | Individuals and/or institutional funders purchase equity issued by a company |
Revenue / Profit Share Crowdfunding | Individuals and/or institutions purchase securities from a company, such as shares, and share in the profits or royalties of the business | ||
Real Estate Crowdfunding | Individuals and/or institutional funders provide equity or subordinated debt financing for real estate | ||
Community Shares | Raising money by offering a local community a chance to own shares in a community-local organisation | ||
Capital Raising Retail Brokerage | Raising money on behalf of a client form a retail audience in exchange for a commission | ||
Capital Raising Institutional Brokerage | Raising money on behalf of a client form a institutional audience in exchange for a commission | ||
Non Investment-Based Crowdfunding | Donation-Based Crowdfunding | Donors provide funding to individuals, projects or companies based on philanthropic or civic motivations with no expectation of monetary or material | |
Reward-Based Crowdfunding | Backers provide funding to individuals, projects, or companies in exchange for non-monetary rewards or products | ||
Token Hosting Platform | Platform (most often exchanges) offering to host a token sale selected against a set of criteria | ||
Digital Banks | Retail-Facing | Fully Digitally Native Bank (Retail) | Provide banking services to individual consumers exclusively through digital platforms |
Marketplace Bank (Retail) | Banking provider offers products and services from a range of providers including its own to individual consumers | ||
MSME-Facing | Fully Digitally Native Bank (MSME) | Provide banking services to businesses exclusively through digital platforms | |
Marketplace Bank (MSME) | Banking provider offers products and services from a range of providers including its own to businesses | ||
Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) | An end-to-end process that allows other organisations to set up and offer digital banking services | ||
Agent Banking (Cash-In / Cash-Out) | Performs services in some capacity on behalf of another banking entity | ||
Digital Savings | Digital Money Market / Fund | Allows fundraising through the selling of short-term debt which can be bought by investors | |
Digital Micro Saving Solutions | Small savings opportunities identified within individuals existing budget and automatically put money into a savings account to encourage positive behavioural change | ||
Digital Savings Collective / Pool | Members pay into a common platform and contributions are pooled for issuing loans. Interest from the loans shared among the members | ||
Savings-as-a-Service (SaaS) | An end-to-end process that allows other organisations to set up and offer saving services | ||
Digital Payments | Payment Services | Digital Remittances (Cross Border-P2P) | Provide cross-border remittances services |
Digital Remittances (Domestic-P2P) | Provide domestic remittances services | ||
Money Transfer (P2P / P2B / B2P / B2B) | Provide digital means of payment to access and utilize funds stored in an account (e.g. Virtual debit/credit card, Wallet) | ||
eMoney Issuers | Issue electronic funds and provide digital means of payment to access and use those funds (e.g. Virtual prepaid card, E-Money) | ||
Mobile Money | Use of a mobile phone in order to transfer funds between banks or accounts, deposit or withdraw funds or pay bills | ||
Acquiring Services Providers for Merchants | Provide means for the acceptance of digital payments by merchants | ||
Points of Access (PoS / mPoS / Online PoS) | Provide hardware or software to capture payment transactions to transmit to a network | ||
Bulk Payment Solutions | Provides payments to multiple beneficiaries from a single transaction | ||
Top-ups & Refills | Provider facilitating the top-ups or refill of various products and services such as mobile phone contracts | ||
Backend Services | Payment Gateways | Provides digital payment acceptance services on behalf of multiple acquirers to integrate different types of digital payments mechanisms/instruments | |
Payment Aggregators | Collect payments on behalf of multiple merchants and accept different digital payments instruments | ||
API Hubs for Payments | Integrate different online payment services through a unified API service | ||
Settlement & Clearing Services Providers | Manage and operate digital platforms where different entities exchange funds on their behalf or on behalf of their customers | ||
Cryptoasset Payments | Money Transfer (Cryptoasset) | Provides means of payment to access, utilise, and transfer funds for various use cases (e.g. remittances, bill payments) | |
Consumer Spending | Provides debit card or other ways for consumers to spend their cryptoassets | ||
Top-ups & Refill (Cryptoasset) | Provider facilitating the top-ups or refill of various products and services (e.g. mobile contract, prepaid card) | ||
Payment Processor | Provides services for the processing of electronic transactions | ||
Points of Access (Cryptoasset) | Provides hardware or software to capture payment transactions to transmit to a network (PoS, mPoS, on-line PoS) | ||
Stablecoin Issuance | Asset-Backed Stablecoin | Issues tokens whose value is pegged to the value of an asset or a basket of assets | |
Algorithmic Stablecoin | Issue token whose market value is maintained using algorithmic means | ||
Cryptoasset | Trading | Order-Book | Central limit order book using a trading engine to match buy and sell spot orders from users |
Decentralised Exchange (DEX) Relayer | Peer-to-peer relay exchange built on top of a public blockchain | ||
Single Dealer Platform / OTC Trading | Provider enabling clients to engage in bilateral trades outside of formal trading venues | ||
Trading Bots | Platform using an algorithm to optimise trading strategies | ||
High-Frequency Trading (HFT) Services | Provider enabling automated market-making and arbitrage strategies | ||
Advanced Trading Services | Services allowing users to buy portfolio bundles and get access to more sophisticated trading tools (e.g. margin, derivatives) | ||
Intermediation & Brokerage | Retail Brokerage Services | Platform allowing users to acquire and/or sell cryptoassets at fixed prices and submit orders | |
Institutional Brokerage Services | Service providers executing trade orders on behalf of their institutional clients | ||
Aggregation | Platform aggregating prices to facilitate trade selection for consumers | ||
Other Financial Transaction Processing | Bitcoin Teller Machines (BTM) | Machine allowing users to buy and sell cryptoassets in exchange for physical cash | |
P2P Cryptoasset Marketplaces | Buyer and seller matching platform often coupled with cryptocurrency escrow services | ||
Clearing | Transmitting, reconciling and, in some cases, confirming transfer orders from the time a commitment for a transaction is made until it is settled | ||
Digital Custody | Institutional Custody | Third-Party Custody | Fully-managed custody solutions often using an omnibus model |
Co-Managed Custody | Sophisticated custody solutions using multi-party computation (MPC), often associated with a 'walled garden' setup/closed environment | ||
Retail Custody | Hardware Cryptoasset Wallet | Small devices that securely store private keys without exposing them to connected machines | |
Unhosted Cryptoasset Wallet | Non-custodial applications that store cryptoassets on a device (e.g. mobile, desktop, tablet) | ||
Hosted Cryptoasset Wallet | Custodial applications that store cryptoassets on a device (e.g. mobile, desktop, tablet) or that can be accessed from any connected device via a browser | ||
eMoney Wallet | Online applications that can be accessed from any connected device via a browser | ||
Key Management Services | Providers offering technology infrastructure to self-custody their cryptoassets | ||
InsurTech | Usage-Based Insurance | Premiums or level of cover are determined by usage behaviour | |
Parametric-Based Insurance | Compensates policy holders automatically based on pre-defined triggers associated with losses | ||
On-Demand Insurance | Insurance is extended in real-time for a specific risk event and duration | ||
P2P Insurance | Risk-sharing network where a group of individuals pool premiums | ||
Technical Service Provider (TSP) | Enables distribution partnerships with MNOs, virtual market places and other consumer aggregation points | ||
Digital Brokers or Agents | Allows users to buy insurance cover, underwritten by one or multiple insurers | ||
Comparison Portal | Compares insurers and insurance options to facilitate policy selection | ||
Customer Management | Supports insurers in managing customer acquisition | ||
Claims & Risk Management Solutions | Supports insurers in risk management and the processing digital claims | ||
IoT (including Telematics) | Remote devices connected to insurance services | ||
WealthTech | Asset Management | Digital Wealth Management | Online platforms to supply and provide asset management services |
Social Trading | Platforms that provide investment advice through a social network | ||
Robo-Advisors | Asset management automated solutions based on algorithms or artificial intelligence | ||
Pension-Led Funding | Enabling companies to borrow funds from a company director's personal pension, which are then paid back with interest | ||
Robo Retirement / Pension Planning | Robo-advisors use algorithms and machine learning to offer pension advice | ||
Personal Financial Services | Personal Financial Management / Planning | Allows the ability to understand and effectively apply various financial skills, including personal financial management, budgeting, and investing | |
Financial Comparison Sites | Online and mobile platforms comparing financial products | ||
RegTech | Profiling & Due Diligence | Collects and integrates data from multiple sources to build a profile of a person or entity to allow identity confirmation and categorisation according to regulation | |
Blockchain Forensics | Captures and records key biographical attributes such as location of birth for identification, BF: Monitors customer deposits and withdrawals for signs of “tainted” coins that may have been involved in criminal activity | ||
Risk Analytics | Uses big data to assess the risk of fraud, market abuse or other misconduct at the transaction level | ||
Dynamic Compliance | Facilitates and monitors regulatory changes to ensure that policies and controls adapt seamlessly to changing requirements | ||
Regulatory Reporting | Reporting and Dashboards | ||
Market Monitoring | Matches market-level outcomes to regulatory or internal rules to, for example, identify poor product performance | ||
Alternative Credit Analytics | Psychometric Analytics | Connects an individual’s personality type and behaviour with a credit or insurance product | |
Sociometric Analytics | Analyzes social communication patterns with social sensing technology to drive innovative transformation services | ||
Biometric Analytics | Discovers patterns within biometric signals to ascertain potentially valuable information about a person such as emotional state or longevity. | ||
Alternative Credit Rating Agency | Issues corporate ratings on corporate issuers not considered a financial institution or insurance undertaking | ||
Credit Scoring | Helps lenders see the true creditworthiness of their customers by removing unconscious biases and adding much-needed nuance to credit applications. | ||
Digital Identity | Security & Biometrics | Captures and records key biometric attributes such as fingerprints for identification | |
KYC Solutions | Supports companies by verifying the identity of their clients (to comply with laws & regulations) | ||
Fraud Prevention & Risk Management | Aims to prevent theft and misuse of personal data | ||
Tech. for Enterprise | API Management | The process of creating and publishing web application programming interfaces (APIs) by, for example, enforcing their usage policies and analyzing usage statistics | |
Cloud Computing | The on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user | ||
AI / ML / NLP | Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning/ Natural Language Processing | ||
Enterprise Blockchain | The features of blockchain technology that will solve major enterprise problems | ||
Financial Management & Business Intelligence | Business intelligence tools that help finance professionals gain insight in internal and the external factors that affect the bottom line | ||
Digital Accounting | The formation, representation and transmission of financial data in an electronic format | ||
Electronic Invoicing | A form of electronic billing to allow collection of payment | ||
Consensus Services | Mining | Hardware Manufacturing | Entities designing and building component of mining equipment (e.g. chip, GPU, ASIC) |
Remote Hosting Services | Services hosting and maintaining customer-owned mining equipment | ||
Cloud Mining | Services renting out hashpower generated by their own machines to consumers for a fixed period of time | ||
Hashrate Brokerage | Marketplace connecting sellers of hashpower (hashers) with buyers | ||
Proprietary Hashing | Miners operating mining equipment on their own behalf | ||
Pool Operation | Services combining computational resources from multiple hashers and distributing rewards | ||
Equipment Procurement & Financing | Services facilitating the sale and/or financing of mining equipment | ||
Firmware & Software Development | Entities developing software or firmware for mining | ||
Staking-as-a-Service | Third-party offering services to pool stakeholders' staking capacity and participate in the validation process on their behalf |
An organisation is classified in a category when its service offerings meet the definition of that category. The classification process is not exclusive, i.e. one organisation might fall under multiple categories when it offers more than one service. This approach ensures uniformity of entity classification over time.
The classification system will be periodically revised, based on internal research and external feedback from the public, to reflect the industry’s dynamic nature and constantly evolving composition.
Organisation Inclusion Criteria
The criteria for organisation inclusion into the Cambridge Fintech Ecosystem Atlas are:
• Scope of operations of an organisation. The operating activities of an entity should be directly related to the fintech industry and fit within the boundaries of the CCAF classification system (Table 1).
• Minimum lifespan. As one of the objectives of the Atlas is to provide the longitudinal and historical dataset, the entity is not de facto required to be operational at present, however, it must have had a minimum operational lifespan and an active business within that lifespan.
• Organisational structure. An entity should have some form of identifiable operational structure. Although an entity is not required to be legally structured or incorporated in any jurisdiction(s) to be included in the database, this type of information with respect to its legal structure can be used to evaluate this criterion. The organisational structure criterion may also vary depending on the type of activities an entity undertakes.
Additional optional criteria include:
• Public disclosure. An entity should have clear, transparent, and publicly available information related to its activities and operations (e.g. a functional website, company registry entry).
• Digital footprint. An entity should have an online presence (e.g. a working website, social or development platform accounts, matching email address) showcasing its product(s) and/or services at the time of operating.
• Individual behind the company. An entity should be associated with an identifiable person or a pseudonymous alias (e.g. forum account username).
Data Collection
The data presented in the Cambridge Fintech Ecosystem Atlas that exists in the public domain is obtained through desk research whereas non- personally identifiable data is sourced from survey findings. Data is collected from primary sources, such as company website, official documents, company statements, in-person, or phone interviews; as well as secondary data sources such as news articles, blog posts, podcasts and other online presence.
The entity attributes collected and currently made available for the public are described in Table 2.
Table 2: Variables used for data collection
Variable Name | Description | Possible sources |
Trade name | The trade name of the organisation, as colloquially known in the industry | https://twitter.com/; https://web.archive.org/; https://www.crunchbase.com/ |
Legal name | The legal name of the organisation as recorded in legal registers | |
Launch date | The date that the organisation launched its operations | https://opencorporates.com/; https://twitter.com/; https://web.archive.org/ |
Ownership type | The type of organisation (‘Public’, ‘Private’, ‘Non-profit’). Public companies are defined as those publicly traded on major exchange venues. | |
Social media metrics | The organisation twitter handle, Reddit channel, follower count, likes, comments, shares | https://www.reddit.com/; https://twitter.com/; https://www.crunchbase.com/; https://www.linkedin.com/ |
Website URL | The URL of the organisation’s landing page or if applicable an archival capture of the URL of the organisation’s former landing page | https://twitter.com/; https://www.reddit.com/; https://www.linkedin.com/ |
Incorporation date | The date that the entity was incorporated | |
Incorporation number | The unique entity number as publicly available in jurisdictional company registrars | individual jurisdictional company registrars |
Cessation of operations (date and reason, if applicable) | The date that the organisation ceased its operations. The reason identified for an organisation to cease its operations (‘Acquisition’, ‘Termination’, ‘Merger’, ‘Pivot’) | https://web.archive.org/; https://opencorporates.com/; https://twitter.com/ |
Operational headquarters | The country where the organisation predominantly operates from | https://www.linkedin.com/; https://twitter.com/; https://opencorporates.com/; https://www.crunchbase.com/ |
Incorporation jurisdiction | The jurisdiction where the parent organisation has been incorporated | |
Services description | Description of an organisation’s service offering | |
Number of employees | Full-time equivalent employees | https://www.crunchbase.com/; https://www.linkedin.com/; https://opencorporates.com/ |
Limitations
Limitations of the data collected are listed below, along with the approach adopted to address and mitigate some of these challenges.
Complex corporate structure: corporate entities are often structured in complex ways, based on multiple commercial, legal and tax considerations. In most cases, the shareholding patterns and corporate structures of such private entities are not available in the public domain and disentangling them becomes difficult. In such cases, the rule of thumb has been to focus on the parent company rather than subsidiaries.
Unidentified operational headquarters and incorporation jurisdiction: some organisations do not have any identifiable physical presence from where they conduct their operations and/or have no trace of incorporation. Operational headquarters was classified as “Unidentified” to denote the inability to verify the primary location of an entity’s operations and/or its incorporation country. Incorporation numbers refer to those of the parent entity unless otherwise stated.
Service offerings: the services and activities an organisation is engaged in were commonly found on the organisation’s website, official press releases, or through external communications. Though the name, description and launch date of services are true to the best of the knowledge of the research team, some information might remain unproven due to limitations on the public availability of data. The research team has made all possible efforts to cross-check the information using users’ posts on forums, platforms such as Reddit or bitcointalk.org, and in rare instances, registered onto the platform to precisely assess an organisation’s service offering.
Entity history: the most arduous task has been to accurately track the history of an entity, from the evolution of its offering and portfolio to changes in its geographic location. For the chronology of service offerings, a combination of web archives research (e.g. Wayback Machine) and search engine entries for historical news articles and blog posts was used to determine the launch date of a particular product or service offering.
New form of organisational structures: the emergence of the alternative finance industry, and the cryptoasset ecosystem, in particular, has enabled new forms of the organisational structure previously unseen. In particular, multiple projects were developed by team members with no common location. Organisations falling under this category were classified as ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation’ (‘DAO’).
Ambiguity between communicated information and officially recorded information: at times, the information displayed on social media did not match recorded in the official or verified database (e.g. company registrar). While the research team often opted for the official version, cross-checking information from multiple distinct sources was used as a substitute when no official information was available.
Lack of clear information regarding cessation of operations (reason and date): as any emerging industry, the alternative finance ecosystem has naturally witnessed the emergence and disappearance of multiple entities. In the early days, organisation dissolution occurred frequently without too much publicity. When cessation date could not be identified, the research team used the last year of online activity (e.g. tweet, last screenshot available in web archives) as a proxy. Unclear reason of the cessation of activity was classified as ‘Termination’.