CreditEase Invests In Three US-Based FinTechs

CreditEase, the Chinese FinTech investment fund, announced Friday (March 17) it had made investments in FinTech companies in the US.

According to a report, CreditEase said it participated in a Series C financing round for Trumid, a U.S. electronic bond trading platform, and took part in a Series B round for WeConvene, the FinTech focused on the capital markets. It also invested in WorldCover, a P2P insurance startup’s seed round of fundraising, according to Finxetra. The fund, which is a unit of CreditEase’s lending marketplace, has invested in eight companies since the fund launched in 2015, including Circle, a Blockchain company, Tradeshift and DYCD.com, a car financing FinTech .

“We believe the Chinese FinTech market will continue to grow in 2017 and beyond, as many three-to-five-year-old companies have grown into large-scale operations. We expect many of these to mature into high-quality, mid-to-late-stage companies. Similarly, we anticipate a slew of promising early- and mid-stage growth companies in the U.S. market, due to the improving climate for investment, as well as the more sustainable development of fintech sector,” Anju Patwardhan, senior partner of CEFIF.

China is an emerging FinTech hotbed thanks to its expanding middle-class, rapid digitization and electronic payments adoption. But a new report from Citi found that, while China may be the market to watch for FinTech investments, the U.S. continues to thrive at the top of the B2B FinTech mountain.

According to Digital Disruption — Revisited: What FinTech VC Investments Tells Us About A Changing Industry, Citi expects an influx in venture capital across the FinTech startup scape. But not all markets are created equal. China saw more than half of the world’s FinTech investments in the first nine months of 2016, the bank noted.

“2016 was the year when the Chinese FinTech dragons roared and some previously feted Western FinTech leaders wilted,” Citi declared in the report’s introduction. The nation’s current market climate is ideal to fostering FinTech growth and innovation, and investors will fuel that growth through 2017. That’s clearly great news for China, which has proven resilient despite a global slowdown in venture capital investments in FinTech startups.