FINTECH ARTICLES OF THE YEAR 2016
Blockchain, women in FinTech, and Lending Club topped the FinTech Rising Favorite FinTech articles of 2016.
What “favorite” means, however, depends on how you measure it, as anyone in media and marketing will tell you. Our top three are based on three different measures of the more than 400 articles we summarized in 2016.
The top article goes to the Goldman Sach’s report Profiles in Innovation: Blockchain (8/7/16). That one received the highest number of unique reader clicks in the weekly FinTech Rising email.
Next is an article on Innovate Finance’s Women in FinTech Powerlist (12-4-16). It’s the clear winner in total number of clicks, as a couple of readers either clicked on its link a lot of times to reference the list or shared it with a lot of others.
Third on our list goes to my personal favorite article of the year: How Lending Club’s Biggest Fanboy Uncovered Shady Loans (8/21/16). Two BloombergBusinessweek reporters told the story of Lending Club’s woes while explaining the intricacies of P2P and marketplace lending.
Most Read Articles
Lists of influencers, trends, and companies make up most of the other top articles, with one of articles in the second place position clearly a “home town favorite” list of Chicago FinTech companies. We had a lot of ties in the top five, hence the duplications in the list.
1. Profiles in Innovation: Blockchain (8/7/16)
2. FinTech for Startups and TechFin for Bankers (4/1/16)
2. 24 Chicago FinTech Companies Revolutionizing Financial Services (10/23/16)
2. The 100 Most Influential FinTech Leaders in 2016 (12/4/16)
3. 20 Fintech Companies to Watch (6/19/16)
3. Fintech 2016: Top 100 Influencers and Brands (7/17/16)
3. FinTech Infographics: The Evolution of FinTech (7/31/16)
3. U.S. Federal Reserve Releases First Distributed Ledger Research Paper (12/11/16)
4. How Lending Club’s Biggest Fanboy Uncovered Shady Loans (8/21/16)
4. Top 6 Robo-advisors for Managing Your Investments (9/10/16)$
5. The Power of Default (5/1/16)
Top Social Media Articles
Blockchain topped the list of social media favorites as well. The content of our Blockchain campaign for Synechron came in ahead of four issues devoted to payments, our 2016 trends, FinTech definitions, and FinTech growth reports.
For the record, the trends we tracked pretty well matched how the year shook out. As for our social leader, we may have promoted the Blockchain content harder on social, and it certainly benefitted from a lift from Synechron. But it lead in social clicks as measured by Bitly shares that interest in the topic likely put it out ahead of the general trends articles.
1. Synechron – FinLabs Blockchain (9-22-16)
3. FinTech Trends 2016 (1-15-16)
5. FinTech is Still Rising (4-8-16)
Our Top Articles According to Google
Yet another picture of FinTech interest in 2016 emerges from a look at traffic to the FinTech Rising website. Four of the of the top five articles were original articles reported and written by me, a gratifying result because these articles are summarized and linked in the emails and on social no more than any other articles.
Google is known to favor original content in search results over aggregated content, but I’ll take the result. The top article in the Google batch is also the last article in the social group, and it’s our anniversary post, marking the launch of the FinTech Rising website.
The second article features my favorite bit of original reporting in a cover of Blockchain talk in Chicago.
1. FinTech is Still Rising (4-8-16)
2. William Mougayar: THE BLOCKCHAIN WATCH (10-1-16)
3. Data Power: Money20/20 (10-30-16)
