Chatsworth is back from the beach, and the surfing and margaritas buzz is fading to a sunset dream. Top of the inbox, KPMG’s bi-annual pulse of fintech report. The headline stats make for sober reading.
Global fintech investment fell 18% percent in the first six months of 2025 from $54.2bn to $44bn. The number of deals fell from 2,376 to 2,216. That’s a heck of a drop and a pattern we would not want to see continued.
UK bucks the trend
Some relative cheer for Blighty, as UK fintech investment only fell 5% to $7.2 bln over the same period, bucking that trend considerably as London remains a hot centre for traditional and new finance.
Annual pulses and monitors are interesting but if we’re honest, we’re a bit “meh” on them, particularly if the data is incomplete (which it frequently is) or the parameters are not as wide as we’d like.
At Chatsworth towers, we’re typically far more interested in longer-term patterns, where the money’s going and what we’re seeing beyond the relatively narrow measure of fintech based on the absolute number of deals done.
And that is the crucial point. The strength of the sector pivots on what we mean when we say ‘fintech’. It very much depends on definitions and what we choose to measure.
Growth and transformation in wholesale and capital markets
There has been an obvious and measurable explosion of investment and fintech transformation across wholesale markets which are difficult to measure. A lot of that money is technology spend outside of the standard definition of a ‘deal’.
There are serious wholesale forces at play and assets moving on-ledger, alongside the growth of interest in crypto and whatever view you choose to take about the relative value of those assets.
We’re in the midst of a full-throttle shift towards digitisation of assets and pivot to digital transformation, which has been gaining pace for a decade and given additional rocket fuel by the Genius Act in the US.
In Chatsworth’s view, this capital markets shift to new technology is just as “fintech” as the deals which seem to get the headlines.
Digital Asset recently raised over $135 million from big names such as Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, and Circle to expand Canton Network’s blockchain infrastructure and accelerate the onboarding of new institutions.
This network now manages more than $4 trillion in tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) and is supporting asset classes ranging from bonds to alternative funds. That’s some growth. In short, the onboarding of real-world assets is accelerating, making blockchain’s original transformative promise an institutional-scale reality. This is fintech.
John Wu, of Ava Labs believes the US GENIUS Act is a pivotal point which will completely reshape global trade and kick-start digital economies, from gaming to micropayments, cutting costs, removing friction, and making finance faster and smarter.
Looking ahead, Ava Labs predict that crypto adoption will surge, driven by the expanding utility of stablecoins in powering everyday payment technologies as stablecoins and related applications become seamlessly integrated into daily transactions. Again, fintech pure and simple.
So, while it’s not quite “lies, damn lies and statistics”, taking an accurate temperature check on the fintech sector means we need a wider definition, even if measuring wholesale markets transformation and asset adoption could prove a little trickier than deal counting.
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