Analysing the most promising global payments businesses in 2023
Last week, we released our brand new market map tracking emerging businesses in the global payments space: The 30 Most Promising Cross-Border Payment Companies. If you missed it, you can see the full report containing comprehensive bios of each company on our website. This week, we take a closer look at some of the data behind these companies to identify common disruption trends in 2023.
Infrastructure leads by business segment, UK by HQ country
The graphic above breaks down the global payments companies included in our 30 Most Promising market map based on their primary business, decade founded, CEO gender, employee numbers and HQ locations. Examining these factors yields some interesting points:
- Most companies on our map have payment infrastructure/platform as their main business, with the next biggest categories being B2B payments and consumer money transfers. The high number of B2B-focused payments companies highlights a growing demand to simplify the incredibly fragmented B2B payments market, which we expect to total $56tn by 2030, while the growth of remittances companies such as Nala, Purpl and Send Payments has shown how consumer money transfers have remained resilient in emerging markets.
- Over a third of companies have headquarters in the UK, with three in the US and two in Singapore. This is different to our wider Cross-Border Payments Top 100 map, where the US led on home countries (though our report on these companies tracked where companies were founded rather than where their HQs are, and the two are not always the same). UK-based companies on the list were split between B2B and payment platforms, while remittances companies are spread out, with headquarters in countries such as Thailand, Kenya, Canada, Ghana, Australia and Lebanon. Across all 30 companies there are 18 headquarter countries.
- Just one of the companies in our Most Promising map has a female CEO. While this is a smaller sample of global payments companies than FXC’s Top 100 and a less comprehensive analysis of women in C-suite roles than we have done previously, it belies a now familiar finding: new companies in this space continue to be overwhelmingly male-led at the highest level.
- The majority of the companies on our list were founded in the 2010s (18), with two thirds being founded after 2015 and six founded since the beginning of the current decade. Younger companies on an emerging players list isn’t surprising, but combine the fact that some of them already have over 100 employees and are processing billions of dollars across hundreds of markets every year and the speed of their growth becomes apparent.
Who are the 30 Most Promising Cross-Border Payments companies in 2023?
Joe is a Senior Copywriter at FXC Intelligence, writing and editing reports, news and analysis to support the company’s weekly content and client projects. Before joining FXC Intelligence, he worked as a B2B copywriter, journalist and editor covering a broad range of topics, including technology, transport, retail and the food and beverage industries. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Warwick.
