Startups Settle In Sydney To Join Growing FinTech Ecosystem

Sydney, the most populous city in Australia, is also a burgeoning FinTech hub: In fact, Deloitte has ranked it as the eighth most conducive hub for growth in the FinTech sector. The city also has a deep financial talent pool, “robust” wealth management and a high rate of mobile use, the firm noted. As such, startups such as Stake, which offers a way for investors to trade U.S. stocks, call the city home.

“Sydney was the natural choice as a base for Stake as a key financial hub in the Asia Pacific region,” Stake Co-founder and COO Dan Silver told PYMNTS.com in an interview. “First-world economy, high uptake of technology and social media, affluent population, a robust regulatory environment and a population that lived globally but invested locally.”

In terms of the FinTech climate, Silver said the area is seeing growth: “FinTech is becoming more mainstream and finding its role in the ecosystem,” he said, adding that “FinTechs and financial institutions are collaborating more, seeing opportunities to work together, with the institution providing distribution/customers and the FinTech providing the superior product and customer experience.”

To support FinTech firms, the Sydney Startup Hub opened earlier in 2018 in the city’s central business district (CBD) – and the city is also home to other FinTech incubators and hubs. Of the hub, “it’s an amazing co-working space – although we have our own premises, we use it as a base in the CBD when we need somewhere to work or for a meeting,” Silver said.

The hub, which claims to be the first of its kind in the country, offers 17,000 square meters spread through 11 floors in a CBD location. It houses about 2,500 residents and has community and event spaces as well as a regional landing pad, which is a free and dedicated space that allows regional visitors to have a base in the city for up to three days.

Overall, a report produced by KPMG for Committee for Sydney said the city is further ahead in FinTech than Hong Kong but not Singapore, although it  could “potentially challenge” the country. The organization’s chief executive, Tim Williams, told Business Insider Australia, “Sydney’s financial services sector creates 9 percent of national GDP and is bigger in scale than the financial services sector in either Hong Kong or Singapore. A key element in its emerging global reputation is the speedy progress we have made in FinTech in Sydney.”