There are few growth trends more exciting and more potentially transformative than financial technology, or fintech for short. In this article we'll discuss what financial technology is, how it is applied, and where we see fintech going in the future, and we'll tell you about some of the fintech stocks you should put on your radar.

What is fintech?
Fintech, short for financial technology, describes technologies that are being leveraged to make financial processes easier, more efficient, and more profitable. Fintech companies develop a variety of software platforms, apps, hardware solutions, and more to achieve these goals.
In the rest of this article, we'll take a closer look at the real-world applications of financial technology, why fintech is so important to the financial industry, the future potential of fintech, and some excellent publicly traded fintech companies you might want to put on your radar.
Publicly Traded Company
Top Fintech Stocks | Bullish Elevator Pitch |
---|---|
Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) | Of the large-cap U.S. banks, Bank of America has done perhaps the best job of embracing new banking technologies and using them to improve efficiency. |
Global Payments (NYSE:GPN) | This payment processing company is embedding its services into vertical software stacks serving niche industries. |
Green Dot (NYSE:GDOT) | Green Dot is a leading issuer of prepaid debit cards, but the most exciting part of its business is its banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform, which allows companies to offer their own customized financial services to customers. |
MarketAxess Holdings (NASDAQ:MKTX) | This company operates the world's largest electronic fixed-income investment trading platform. |
Mastercard (NYSE:MA) | The world's second-largest payments network has made a number of acquisitions to build out its supplemental services in areas such as AI-powered fraud prevention and data analytics. |
MercadoLibre (NASDAQ:MELI) | This Latin American powerhouse is much more than an e-commerce platform, with a fast-growing digital payments platform that can be used off-site and even a new asset management platform in Argentina. |
nCino (NASDAQ:NCNO) | This company's Bank Operating System is designed to improve efficiency and consumer experiences for banks of all sizes. |
PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ:PYPL) | This digital wallet platform has more than 267 million user accounts, including 21 million merchants. |
Square (NYSE:SQ) | Square is a financial ecosystem for small businesses and individuals, with operations in payment processing, lending, consumer payments, and more. |
Visa (NYSE:V) | The world's largest payments network is showing a renewed interest in making sure it stays ahead of the times after making a key acquisition. |
Investing in fintech
Technology is changing every industry, and its mark on the financial industry will be profound. Fintech is important, as it opens crucial financial services to the world's underbanked population and makes it less expensive for global consumers to move and manage their own money. These companies are not only offering catalysts for these changes, they also offer investors the best chance to profit from them.