UK investment in FinTech rose by 35% to $901m across 72 deals last year, according to statistics compiled by Innovate Finance.
According to the research, the UK attracted the highest volume of deals outside the US and came third in terms of total investment behind the US and China.
Commenting on the findings, Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance said: “One of the big trends in 2015 was investment in FinTech by financial institutions in incubators, accelerators, labs, talent, partnerships, digital M&A, and corporate venture funds.
“A couple of years ago, entrepreneurs in the community were looking for introductions to VCs. Last year, they were interested in introductions to institutions. What this reveals is that corporate venture funding could be the new smart money for FinTech.”
The rise in UK investment was led by large funding rounds from Funding Circle, Transferwise, WorldRemit, eToro, RateSetter, Azimo, The Currency Cloud, MoneyFarm and Seedrs.
Additionally, the data showed that over 60% of the UK’s VC investment in FinTech was in the peer-to-peer, alternative finance, payment and remittance segments, with challenger banks pushing investment volume to over 74%.