Which are The Hottest #FinTech #VC's in Europe Backing the Next Big Breakthrough

These are the main #FinTech investors in Europe.  

The Hottest FinTech Investors in Europe to Back the Next Big Breakthrough in FinTech

Big breaks across industries don’t usually happen without VCs backing them. Success stories in most cases have co-authors and in 2016, VCs are the ones to provide a financial fuel to bright entrepreneurs and ideas with a high disruptive potential.

While some VCs are operating across regions, some have a particular geographical focus. Since Europe is one of the world’s hubs of innovation, the UK and other countries in Europe and in the Nordic region have their dedicated investors. The US is also rich on FinTech-focused VCs that have a keen interest in discovering the next big thing in FinTech. 

Aside from VCs, there are also FinTech accelerators accountable for success stories, both in the US and in Europe.

This time, let’s look at some of the hottest FinTech investors in Europe that also invest in other regions along with European venture allocations.

BBVA Ventures

Description: BBVA Ventures provides funding and expertise to promising technology companies disrupting financial services. The firm works with the entrepreneurs and co-investors in the US and EU, thereby becoming a long-term partner in their success.

Stage/size of investments: Early-stage venture to later-stage venture investments

Segments: FinTech, financial services

Portfolio of payments companies: Prosper, DocuSign, Simple, Radius, Coinbase, SumUp, Personal Capital, Ribbit Capital

Santander InnoVentures

Description: The company launched its $100-million fund in July 2014 to get closer to the wave of disruptive innovation in the FinTech space. Santander InnoVentures aims to support the digital revolution to make sure its customers around the world benefit from the latest know-how and innovations across the banking group’s geographies.

Stage/size of investments: Small companies and startups

Segments: FinTech exclusive

Portfolio: iZettle, MyCheck, Ripple, Kabbage, Cyanogen

Anthemis Group

Description: Anthemis Group is the venture investment and advisory firm at the center of a vibrant ecosystem of startups and financial institutions dedicated to reinventing financial services for the digital world. The firm boasts of being committed investors, thoughtful advisors, active conveners and dedicated problem solvers who share a passion for technology and a belief in the transformative power of digital financial services.

Stage/size of investments: Seed, early-stage ventures and later-stage venture investments

Segments: Retail banking & consumer finance, business & corporate banking, payments, wealth & asset management, capital markets & trading, insurance & risk management, data, technology & infrastructure

Portfolio of payments companies: Moven, Simple, Vericash, Fidor Bank

Index Ventures

Description: Index Ventures backs the best and most ambitious entrepreneurs and help them make their ideas real and lasting. The entrepreneurs it teams up with were born to build their businesses—it is their life’s mission. Working side-by-side with these visionaries makes Index Ventures incredibly optimistic about the future. The transformative companies they’re building, include Dropbox, Etsy, Sonos, SoundCloud, Flipboard, King, BlaBlaCar, Squarespace, Just Eat, Lookout, Hortonworks, Nasty Gal, Pure Storage, Supercell, Criteo, Funding Circle and many others.

Stage/size of investments: Index invests in various multiple stages including seed, early-stage venture, later-stage venture and private equity investments.

Segments: Information technology, life sciences

Portfolio of payment companies: iZettle, Clinkle, TransferWise, Funding Circle, Xapo, Swipely, BitPay, iZettle, CrowdRise, Funding Circle

AXA Strategic Ventures

Description: AXA Strategic Ventures’ commitment to founders and teams is to enhance value and maximize impact, therefore enabling you to engage individuals, customers and businesses. The firm maintains long-term, strategic focus. In other words, AXA Strategic Ventures want to help you become real players in the sharing economy—when you succeed, they succeed.

Stage/size of investments: All stages

Segments: Alternative business models, big data, climate change, financial inclusion and health

Portfolio: FundShop, WIDMEE, FLYR, Policy Genius

Peter Thiel on #Europe's #tech #entrepreneurs & regulators

Europe is a "slacker with low expectations", held back by the poor work ethic of its people

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel rounds on European tech entrepreneurs and regulators

Murad Ahmed and Sally Davies, FT.com

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Europe is a "slacker with low expectations", held back by
the poor work ethic of its people and run by politicians that strangle
technological progress with regulations that are a "cure worse than the
disease".

That is the scathing assessment of Peter Thiel,
co-founder of PayPal, the first venture capitalist to back Facebook and
one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors.

Adam Jeffery | CNBC

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir.

"If you're a slacker with low expectations, those
low expectations are likely to be met," he said. "I don't think optimism
always works. There is a form of pessimism, such as in China where
people work really hard because they are scared that they will be old
while they are still poor.

"Pessimism
in China motivates hard work. Pessimism in Europe has a more
demotivating effect. When you're pessimistic and unmotivated, it has as
self-fulfilling character." Mr Thiel has a reputation for forthright views. In Zero to One, a new book,
he writes that tech start-ups should aspire to become monopolies
because the rapidly shifting nature of the sector ensures they "don't
typically last for ever" and that "disruption", a Silicon Valley
obsession, is a "self-congratulatory buzzword".

  Mr Thiel, a libertarian, also attacked EU regulators and policy makers, which have sought to rein in the likes of Google, Uber and Facebook, where he is a board member, with regulatory probes related to antitrust and privacy.


"Google obviously has a monopoly in search," he said. "There are all
sorts of questions about whether it is abusing that monopoly or not. But
I distrust the power of the EU regulators to make things better. I
think the [technology industry] is dynamic enough that the Google
monopoly will not last for ever. In practice, anything [the EU does] to
micromanage the Google product will produce a cure that's worse than the
disease."

He does have encouraging words to say about London,
which he said straddles continental Europe and the US in attitude and
has overtaken Berlin as the best and "most logical place" to build
technology businesses. "People just work harder here ," he said. "They
just work less hard in Berlin."

Mr Thiel, who has rarely
invested outside of the US, has invested in two start-ups based in the
UK capital: TransferWise, a money transfer business, and Deepmind, an
artificial intelligence group bought by Google for £400 million last
year.

The city's strength is in start-ups that combine financial
services and technology. "London is a financial hub, and unlike New
York, it's not a financial hub where people hate finance," he said.


"There's much more of a self-hating character to New York than there is
to London. This matters, because if you start a tech company in New
York, you will do something very far from finance. Whereas in London, it
would be perfectly respectable to do something with finance and
technology."

But he is critical of Rocket Internet, the German
ecommerce venture capitalist, which announced the pricing for an initial
public offering, targeting a midpoint market capitalisation of €6.2bn,
last week. The €1.5bn IPO was fully subscribed within hours of orders
being taken, leading the group to bring forward the flotation.


"I would not invest in Rocket . . . I would not take a venture capital
firm public, because so much of the value comes from the people who have
started the companies, and its hard to separate the human capital from
the operational component," he said.

He added that Rocket's
companies, which often involve imitating successful business models from
the US and exporting them to new markets, are "much more plays on
globalisation than on technology . . . and I believe technology is more
important than globalisation".



See the article online here: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel rounds on European tech entrepreneurs and regulators