Fintechs explode in Spain, led by “unstoppable” neobanks

Over 300 fintechs are now operational in Spain.

The firms are providing an increasingly wide variety of services that include proposals for managing family finances, comparing mortgages and all kinds of financial products, payments services, financing, investment simulators, financial advice, cryptocurrency trading, bill payment, currency exchange, asset management, investment, and tax and accounts management.

So said the Instituto Coordenadas de Gobernanza y Economía Aplicada which has gathered together a group of experts to analyse the growth of fintechs. 

And one of the main conclusions is that neobanks are the category showing the most growth of all fintech firms, and the most options for development within the finance sector, strongly powered by the digital transformation that has been forced by this year’s health crisis.

The experts exclaimed that in contrast with traditional banks, neobank operations are exclusively digital, can be accessed at any time and from anywhere, and provide active finance sector users with flexible, transparent and low-cost access to a wide range of financial, investment and savings products and services.

The Institute’s analysts consider that the growth trend being shown by neobanks is unstoppable. It is the optimal model in a virtual world, in which digital native customers are the ones who demand which financial business options suit their needs. 

The Institute’s analysts further emphasise that the response from neobanking platforms to that demand has been equally optimal. One of the basic elements of any business strategy in the digital setting is data management, which has been very efficiently harnessed by neobanks operating in Spain. 

Their priority has been to get to know customers and gather and analyse data with scrupulous care for data protection, in order to offer them the very best experience during their financial operations. A personalised service is the goal for neobanks in order to achieve a model of financial services provision that shows maximum efficiency and minimum cost.

The Institute’s analysis reflects the growth prospects that may be offered to neobanks by Spain’s recent law for the Digital Transformation of the Financial System, which provides controlled testing spaces for designing and verifying the functioning of new business models in the financial field. In addition, the experts assembled by the Institute agree with the consensus among financial analysts, who predict that in five years’ time 15% of banking business will be performed by neobanks. 

As part of its analysis, the Institute has looked into how the main operators have evolved and has drawn up a list of the industry’s top five, with MyInvestor the clear leader. The neobank, which has Andbank, El Corte Inglés Seguros and insurer Axa among its shareholders, is about to end the year with a turnover of more than €660 million, considerably ahead of the second-placed neobank, Indexa. The top five neobanks in Spain are as follows.

MyInvestor also appears as one of Europe’s 15 biggest neobanks according to turnover The European top 15 list is as follows.

Jesús Sánchez Lambás, Executive Vice President of Institute Coordenadas, said: “Neobanks are destined to become the leading players in the financial sector’s digital future. They have all the favourable elements and circumstances to radically change the banking world. Their major challenge is to remain faithful to their original hallmarks: a digital base, transparency, data protection, flexibility and a low cost. They are the paradigm of the contradiction in which crises become a source of opportunity.”