Let’s see if you know the answer… Between two companies from traditional finance (Chase and Amex), 2 pure Fintech (Credit Karma and Venmo), and an old Fintech (Paypal), which app is the most downloaded in the US?

Click, then scroll down for the answer… You’ll see what everybody else thinks once you’ve clicked.

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If you’ve answered Amex, then that wasn’t the best choice – they are the least downloaded between all these apps. If you’ve answered Paypal, then it wasn’t too bad of a guess – but they are only in 5th position. Venmo ? I would have answered the same, seeing how viral Venmo is amongst the millenials… But Venmo is only the 4th most downloaded financial app on iOS. Chase? That was much better, because they are the 2nd most downloaded financial app. But the clear winner both on iOS and Android is Credit Karma.

If we spend more time on the list below from App Annie, we’ll notice that amongst the most downloaded financial apps in the US, there are :
5 Fintech or just tech (Credit Karma / Venmo / Paypal / Square / Google Wallet)
3 banks (Chase / Bank of America / Wells Fargo)
2 credit card companies (Capital One / Amex)
1 insurer (Geico)

Whereas for traditional finance companies, we can assume that people who download the apps are existing customers, those who download Credit Karma or Venmo are more likely to be new users. It shows that despite the turbulence affecting Fintech at the moment (from the slowdown in p2p lending to Lending Club), the growth of new financial applications is not slowing down.

Top 10 free finance apps in the US (16 May 2016) Source : App Annie
Ranking

iOS

Android

1 Credit Karma Credit Karma
2 Chase Mobile Chase Mobile
3 Bank of America Bank of America
4 Venmo Wells Fargo
5 Paypal Paypal
6 Wells Fargo Capital One
7 Capital One Venmo
8 Square Cash Square Cash
9 Geico Mobile Geico Mobile
10 Amex Mobile Google Wallet

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Also, we can notice that the applications could be split into:
6 apps for account management (Chase / Bank of America / Wells Fargo / Capital One / Amex /Geico)
4 payment apps (Venmo / Paypal / Square / Google Wallet)
– And Credit Karma to manage one’s credit score

Which makes me think that payments will continue to be one of the sectors where there will be a lot of innovation over the next few years – if only because there is a real demand from consumers.

Looking at ranking of downloaded apps might seem a bit abstract, so if you doubted the popularity of Credit Karma, the next graph should remove any remaining doubt: Credit Karma now has 50 million users in the US, ie. 20% of the adult population!

If you follow Disruptive Finance, then you know that I have a soft spot for Credit Karma (here, here and here…). This is one of these companies that are (were) less visible than some high profile Fintech startups, but this is for me one of the best examples of the shift in finance towards data monetization. Whereas traditionally finance has made little money from data, my view is that data monetization will become much more important in the future.

In other words, Credit Karma would be what Google would do if they were in finance (and note that Google Capital is one of their investors).

Credit Karma has acquired 50 million users in 5 years

Credit Karma has acquired 50 million users in 5 years

As I previously mentioned, I believe that the hype in Fintech is cooling down – at the same time when the real innovations are starting. Looking at what consumers do is a good way to identify the next trends…

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