Fintech 2024 top 100 apps: who’s winning and who’s growing

Fintech is a super-interesting category right now.

On the 1 hand, investment is down, with global startups raising the least since early 2020. On the other hand, they still raised $52 billion in the first 8 months of 2024 — no small amount. Another positive: public valuations are up 114%, a sign that the massive Covid-era investments are paying off in real business value. And the outlook is positive too: fintech has a projected market size of $1.5 trillion in revenue by 2030.

The good news for fintechs focused on mobile: mobile is central to the rise of fintech now and increasingly in the future:

• Mobile apps are central to consumer fintech interactions
• Payment apps, digital wallets, and mobile banking are seeing strong adoption rates
• And innovations in connected commerce, in which banks and fintech companies use mobile data to offer personalized financial services, are growing too

In other words, this is a category worth paying attention to.

In this special fintech report by Singular, we’re going to:

• overview the mobile fintech ecosystem
• list some of the top players in 2024
• identify the major categories
• highlight what’s driving most customer and user penetration right now on mobile
• list the top 50 fintech apps on both iOS and Android
• shine a light on what some of the biggest tech companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook — are doing in fintech.

Origins of fintech (it’s older than you think)

First, let’s start at the beginning. Believe it or not, fintech is actually pretty old. In fact, if we define financial technology as digital or electronic means of dealing with money, fintech has its roots over a hundred years ago.

No, there was no internet, but there were digital communications, in a sense.

In 1918, the U.S. Federal Reserve built the Fedwire Funds Service, which still exists today. Using Morse code on public telegraph circuits, the Fed ensured that the U.S. dollar was worth the same amount in Pittsburgh as in Poughkeepsie, in Seattle as in San Antonio, and that interbank transfers could happen without time-consuming and risky transfers of cash or gold.

Much later in 1995, Wells Fargo — yep, the same company that operated the Pony Express in 1861 — made the first online checking account available.

And on May 22, 2010, a day that will forever be remembered as Bitcoin Pizza Day, Laszlo Hanyecz became the first person to spend cryptocurrency to purchase a physical item: a Papa John’s pizza. Hanyecz spent 10,000 bitcoin for the pizza, which would be worth approximately $673,660,000 USD today. That is 1 very expensive pizza … I sure hope it tasted great.

When we think of fintech today, however, we think of new tech that manages, sends, invests, stores, and maximizes our money. And largely, we think of mobile apps as well as companion websites.

Categories and sub-verticals within fintech

There are likely as many different categorizations of fintech as people thinking about the category, but here’s an overview that simplifies the diversity in fintech as much as possible.

The top 100 fintech apps on the App Store & Google Play

To get a good sense of what’s winning in mobile fintech I looked at the apps that are winning right now on the App Store and Google Play.: the top 50 on both iOS and Android, based on number of downloads/installs recently.

The most interesting findings?

• Out of the 100 total apps on both the Android and iOS top apps list, 60 are duplicates, meaning that 30 out of the 50 iOS apps are also top 50 apps on Android, and vice versa. This is down from 2021, where 39 apps were on both lists.
• Banking has won. 23 of the top 50 on iOS and 18 of the top 50 on Android are banking apps or “everything financial” apps. How this has come about is that almost all the apps that 2 or 3 years ago did 1 thing, now do multiple things: payments, loans, investments, accounts, and more. In other words, fintech apps are increasingly turning into banks, whether they call themselves that or not.
• Payment-only apps are still huge, but way down in terms of importance:
  • iOS: 3 out of the top 4 iOS fintech apps are payments apps
  • Android: exactly the same
  • BUT … other apps are adding payments to what they do
• Propel EBT, which is a food stamps app, is now on both the top 50 Android fintechs and the top 50 iOS fintechs
• iOS has more banks than Android in the top 50 apps
• Android has more loan apps than iOS in the top fintech apps
• Payday loan apps have morphed into on-demand payments, often instantly per day or period or quantity of work, and are increasingly in use for gig workers. They are also upleveling, at least in terms of how they present themselves, as budgeting, savings, and payment apps as well as getting your money fast.
• One of the most interesting payment services, Apple Pay, doesn’t even show up on the list because it’s a default in iOS … not a separate app (more on Apple Pay later)

Here are the top 50 apps on each platform by downloads Data.ai. (Note: data pulled October 25, 2024.)

It’s interesting to see the common apps on both platforms, and where they rank:

If we look at them by category, we get a better sense of what’s happening in the mobile fintech ecosystem. 

Banking is by far the biggest sector by number of apps, whether by neobank or traditional bank. And while payments are the largest sub-vertical in the very upper echelon of fintech apps — the ones with the most installs — it’s second in the top 100. 

Crypto is way down from 3 years ago, the last time I did this analysis.

Payment apps are interesting for a lot of different reasons. First, they’re daily use or at least potentially daily use apps. As such, they’re the perfect app to make a tiny fraction of each transaction and still be able to bring in a lot of revenue. In addition, simple because they are daily use apps, they can be used as a thin edge of a wedge to add on additional features over time, or launch complementary services thanks to your brand being top of mind for users/customers when it comes to money.

It’s a very powerful position to be in fintech, and that’s why Google and Apple are competing fiercely in the space.

From 2020 to 2024, Worldpay estimates that credit card share of e-commerce sales in North America will drop from 23% to 21%, while digital wallets and payment apps will increase from 45% to 52%.

Of course, there is a thin line between payment apps and transfer apps. When apps have a name like WorldRemit, it’s pretty clear what the main function of the app is. But it’s just as possible to use Venmo or Google Pay to send money, depending on where you want to send it and how much cost and hassle you’re willing to put up with.

Here’s the data, so you can see how it breaks down by category.

Top 100 fintech apps by category

Big Tech and fintech: Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook

I mentioned earlier that Apple Pay didn’t even show up on the list of the top 50 payment apps on either platform because it’s a default in iOS. In fact, my new iPhone 16 Pro Max told me every day that device set-up was incomplete until I finally gave up and set up Apple Pay by loading in my credit cards.

What’s interesting about Apple Pay is that it is deep integrated into both Apple’s mobile operating system and desktop. Plus, Apple has the innovative Apple Card — which is still U.S.-only — but offers no fees, ground-breaking family budgeting features, cash back, and useful data on spending patterns.

In addition, Apple Pay has simply huge existing reach and even more massive growth potential:

• Apple Pay has about 535.8 million users globally
• Apple Pay has 60.2 million users in the United States, according to Sprocket
• Last we saw, Apple Pay processed a global total of $6 trillion in payments. That was in 2022; no doubt it has grown since.
• Over 90% of U.S. retailers accept Apple Pay, according to Capital One

According to eMarketer, Apple Pay is three times the size of Google Pay. The last time Apple CEO Tim Cook provided numbers on Apple Pay, he said that Apple had all-time record revenues from payment services, with over three billion transactions in Q4 2019. You can bet it’s far more than that now. Cook also said Apple Pay has more transactions than PayPal and was growing four times faster.

“Apple Pay … has become one of the top three most widely used mobile payment services in Canada, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, UK, and the US.”

– Jonny Evans, Computerworld

But the other big tech companies aren’t laying down and conceding the market.

• Google has a much larger global userbase to convert to its financial apps
• Google has over 150 million active users by some counts

Google is also working with retail partners like Albertsons to integrate their operations with Google Pay. And there are enough Google fans on iOS who choose Google’s payment service over Apple’s that Google Pay is a top-25 app in the fintech category of the App Store.

In addition, Google has significant capabilities, installed base, and advantages in voice-based commerce on Google Home and in the Google app on both Android and iOS, suggesting that as customers get more and more used to asking Alexa, Siri, or Google to order more toilet paper or rent a movie, Google will do well here.

The rest of big tech is busy in fintech as well.

As you’d expect, Microsoft is working more on the business side of fintech, while Amazon has offered Amazon Pay since 2007 and has acquired fintech companies enabling both online and offline purchases. And, of course, Amazon is one of the biggest e-commerce companies outside of China.

The fintech 2024 challenge: profits and growth

COVID normalized digital banking, and the result was massive growth in fintech app usage, especially in the payments and banking categories.

The challenge for 2024 is to keep new users while continuing to expand both customer base and solution set. In some sense there’s a race to the middle between banks and neobanks. Traditional banks need to continue to get more digital and mobile. Neobanks in many cases need to offer more services and capabilities to amortize the cost of customer acquisition over more revenue-generating events … and to avoid losing customers to one-stop-and-you’re-done fintech competitors.

The challenge for fintechs today is to continue to grow in this hyper-competitive market that has been flooded with new cash. Finding the most optimal means of customer acquisition will be a huge competitive advantage, as well-funded rivals are almost guaranteed to be spraying money around like it’s the dot-com boom all over again. And with 26,000 fintech startups globally, this is not going to be an easy sector to win in.

Growth marketers and fintech

Growth marketers have a significant challenge in fintech. Your rivals literally have billions of dollars in new investment. Most of your top competitors have grown significantly through lockdown and quarantine periods.

What’s the best path forward?

Making sure every dollar of spend provides ROI. Optimizing ROAS across new, innovative channels and platforms. Killing poorly-performing partners quickly. Getting the best and the quickest insight into growth opportunities.

It won’t be easy.

Singular can help

If you’re a fintech startup and are looking for marketing intelligence that can drive growth, and marketing measurement that provides the best insights for ROI optimization, book some time with Singular.

Grab a slot here, and let’s chat. We’ll listen more than we talk, understand your business and your needs, and share what we can do to help.