Marketplace lending is but one of several approaches to online lending outside the established financial sector.
To understand the position of marketplace lending in the FinTech space, it is helpful to get an overview of the scene in general. This chapter introduces different innovation themes and business models in FinTech, where many of the sectors and business models overlap and often inform each other or foreshadow what might happen in another segment.
The FinTech landscape is changing fast, so it will make little sense to name and analyze each of the startups and companies in detail; several books and freely available reports are already doing that. Companies change their focus over time, so categorizing them by name would date this publication quickly.Instead, we can classify financial technology innovation by sectors, themes, and their business models. This helps us to understand what these startups are trying to accomplish. Figure 1.1 and Table 1.1 list the innovation themes we will discuss in this chapter.
All these innovation themes rely on underlying technologies, such as data analytics, security, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), or customer relationship management (CRM). These technologies are the prerequisites that allow FinTech startups to compete with established banks; they form a support layer on which all companies in the space rely in one form or another. Some companies in these support functions also qualify as Fin- Tech, but discussing them here would go beyond the scope of this chapter. Figure 1.2 shows how the FinTech innovation themes function in relationship with each other and with their support layers.
1.1