Bahrain: The global fintech market in Q1’17 saw a total investment of US$3.2 billion across 260 deals, according to the Q1’17 edition of The Pulse of Fintech, KPMG International’s quarterly report on fintech investment.
“In the US, the UK, China and other jurisdictions, fintech investors are starting to focus more on performance and return on investment than ever before – pressuring fintechs to demonstrate scalability and a clearer path to profitability,” said Ian Pollari, Global Co-Leader of Fintech, KPMG International.
“At the same time, we’re seeing new fintech companies popping up in places you might not expect – like Poland and Slovakia – under-scoring fintech’s global diversity.”
“There has been a significant push to promote Bahrain as a regional fintech hub. Bahrain offers the right regulatory environment, extremely competitive operating costs, government support, funding support and a ready financial services sector to work with. We do see a lot of potential of fintech companies collaborating with financial services players to transform the financial services sector in Bahrain and the region”. He added “We are also shortly launching a fintech survey with businesses in the financial services sector in Bahrain which will benchmark the fintech strategies and readiness of Bahrain based financial institutions with the rest of the world,” Jalil AlAali, Partner and Head of Financial Services at KPMG in Bahrain commented on the report and said.