The FinTech darlings aren’t banks or Bitcoin – they’re Google and Apple

When FinTech thought leaders talk about the big FinTech companies, they don’t talk about major banks or credit card companies – they talk about Google and Apple, according to GlobalData.

GlobalData’s ‘Fintech Influencer’ platform – which tracks and categorizes all content shared by the most influential FinTech thought leaders each day on Twitter – reports that Google was the most frequently mentioned company in discussions about blockchain, AI, IoT and big data. When the topic is payments, they mostly mention Apple.

Mastercard and JP Morgan Chase, whose core businesses represent financial services, were featured in discussions about blockchain and payments, but neither company made it to the overall top 10.

“To keep up with the Internet giants, the traditional technology vendors are gearing up their capabilities in areas which will drive value in the future. The challenge for banks is to ensure they are not left behind, whether through partnership, collaboration or in-house R&D” says Kit Carson, head of banking and FinTech at GlobalData.

While the price of Bitcoin continues to dominate mainstream media headlines, key influencers within the FinTech industry focused on a broader range of issues.

Drones, chatbots, wearables and data science were the other topics that featured in the discussions of FinTech key influencers with as much intensity as Bitcoin, says GlobalData.

The topics discussed on Twitter differed across the globe, with chatbots taking center stage in Germany. There was significant discussion on smart cities in China, while wearables were a more popular topic than Bitcoin in the US.

A deeper analysis of influencer discussions on Twitter provides a clear picture of the direction companies are heading in. GlobalData found that Google was mentioned in 32% of tweets about artificial intelligence. Surprisingly for a company synonymous with the internet however, the influencer tool found that Microsoft and IBM received more than double the amount of tweets than Google in discussions about the Internet of Things.

IBM also dominated discussions involving blockchain. Much of the discussion was likely caused by the recently launched IBM-Maersk joint venture, GlobaData says – both companies have embarked on an effort to provide more “efficient and secure methods” for organizing global trade using blockchain.