With Monday’s announcement of Visa’s investment in Global Processing Services and Mastercard’s recent investment in Marqeta, the biggest players in global payments are closer to upgrading their legacy technology with the modern tech that is reshaping the payments space.
Investments have been pouring into the fintech space over the past few year. But how close are these startups to becoming mainstream players? One way to learn is to track the perception of how they’re talked about in various media sources.
Let’s take a look at what the perception of top payments fintechs show us at the beginning of Q42020.
Fintech Market Intelligence Review – Payments Startups
The Rehinged.AI Fintech Marketing Intelligence platform interprets how the market is talking about 100+ top fintech startups.
For this analysis, we're looking at 10 in the payments space:
- Braintree
- Klarna
- PayPal
- Rapyd
- Remitly
- Square
- Stripe
- Tradeshift
- TransferWise
- Venmo
Our AI platform is a real-time market research tool for fintech analysts, investors and anyone else interested in the fintech space. Let’s take a look at a couple of interesting findings.
Market Perception
One of the ways that the Rehinged.AI platform interprets content at scale is by measuring “perception metrics” on a corpus (text or groups of text).
We designed our AI platform such that a perception metric can be any noun or adjective. This feature is unique compared to the standard sentiment analysis offered on other platforms which only evaluate if a corpus is overall positive or negative. This uniqueness opens up numerous use cases for researchers to evaluate how a corpus talks about a company, product, brand or person.
Our AI platform has the ability to interpret and compare any objects on any perception metrics. In this example, we're comparing the above fintechs in the payments space on acceptance and trust.
If you hover over TransferWise, you'll see that it has the highest score for trust. This is based on our AI / NLP analysis of 417 news articles mentioning TransferWise since 2019 (as of 10/19/20). Tradeshift scores the highest for acceptance.
Takeaway
- Since all 10 of these fintech payments startups have a positive score for both acceptance and trust, it shows that the media uses language that scores positive for acceptance and trust. That’s a strong signal that these fintech startups are already well accepted by mainstream media. More analyses are offered by our AI platform such as a differentiation of the results by groups of media.
Trends
Let's take a look at Square, a large payments fintech. When you view all of the metrics over time, you can see that Square (as of 10/19/20) is trending up for trust, desire, satisfaction, acceptance, quality and enthusiasm.
While the current trend (for Q420 as of 10/19/20) is down for efficient, valuable and a few others, the overall trendline is up. Since our AI platform is interpreting articles daily and scoring these by quarter, the sample size for Q420 is still very small since we're only 19 days into the quarter. Thus, this may change over time from our daily updates as we process new daily content.
Takeaway
- Almost all perception metrics are trending up over 2020, after a few, such as satisfaction and acceptance, suffered a substantial drop at the end of 2019. Since the timescale for these perception metrics is quarterly, reviewing the monthly scoring can provide insights on market events within a quarter.
Here's the scoring for Stripe for trust on a monthly basis.
Takeaway
- There was a drop in trust in March 2020 with the US stock market crash due to the pandemic. However, trust increased after April.
- You can find these monthly metrics for Stripe (or any specific fintech) in the Companies section of the Payments grouping and you can access the articles that contributed to the scores given by our AI platform.
PERCEPTION BY MEDIA SOURCE
Another interesting view is to look at perception metrics by media grouping. In the below example, we're looking at how PayPal scores across 10 perception metrics in the following five groupings:
- US major news sources
- US business news sources
- Financial industry news sources
- Fintech blogs and writers
- Financial reviews and tips
Takeaway
- For acceptance, PayPal scores the highest from fintech blogs and writers. Financial reviews and tips, financial industry news sources, US business news and US major news all follow in sequence. This is a signal that the enthusiasts and industry insiders are more accepting of the technology and service than the mainstream media.
Next Steps
Access 100s of these analyses, in real time, in the Rehinged.AI Fintech Market Intelligence platform. We're tracking 100+ top fintechs in 16 categories.
To discuss accessing this intelligence for your company - both our proprietary NLP algorithms or our fintech research - contact us.