Globally, traditional financial institutions increasingly believe they are at risk of losing business to stand-alone FinTech companies. This trend is most noticeable in North America, where the proportion of traditional financial institutions who believe stand-alone FinTech companies will take part of their business has risen by 13 points in just one year.

Payments, fund transfers and personal finance top the list of activities traditional financial businesses believe their customers are already using FinTech companies for in 2017.

At 29%, Canada lags behind most countries in being “Mobile First,” which is a major contributing factor to FinTech adoption rates. By comparison, the global average of mobile web traffic sits at 50%. This comparison can, however, be deceiving. While most developed nations have had prevalent access to the Internet in the form of desktop computers and laptops for some time, most developing nations have not. For developing nations, Internet access has often been a privilege, and mobile technology is the first and only accessible form of Internet access large portions of the population have ever known, greatly increasing the share of mobile web traffic and inflating the global average.

Even among its already digitally active population, at 18%, Canada’s rate of FinTech adoption also falls well below the global average of 33%.

Despite its relatively low mobile share of web traffic and FinTech adoption rate, Canada is still home to three of the world’s top-ranked FinTech hubs, with Toronto ranking in the number 7 position. This can be attributed to its high scores in the categories Government Support, and Talent and Innovation. These high rankings reveal Canada is well-positioned to be a potential future leader in the FinTech space.

Taking a closer look at FinTech activity within Canada, Lending, Payments and Insurance dominate. Together, these activities make up 41% of the FinTech services used by Canadians.

The Toronto region (including Waterloo) appears especially well-positioned for future FinTech growth. Toronto is both the second largest Financial and Tech sector in North America, with a strong base of financial services workers and tech equity value.

The focus of FinTech start-ups in the Toronto region appears to be following the trend of FinTech services in Canada as a whole, with payments, lending and banking back office services accounting for 52% of their offerings.

Canadian big banks are getting more and more involved in the FinTech sector as well by supporting incubators to get in on the ground floor of future FinTech innovations.