We are pleased to be sharing our latest quarterly report with you. In this report, we look at the emerging trends and notable M&A transactions in Financial Technology during the fourth quarter of 2024.

During this quarter we witnessed a strong commitment from financial technology providers to invest in the Asset & Wealth Management space (Amundi’s acquisition of wealth management platform provider Aixigo, as well as BNY Mellon’s acquisition of the middle-to-back-office asset management provider, Archer). We also saw growth and consolidation in Data and Analytics (Vitruvian Partners’ purchase of cloud-enabled IT services provider Options Technology, along with Germany-based Nagarro’s acquisition of data transformation and visualisation provider Keylane).

• Payments experienced a high level of M&A in Q4 2024, with 35 companies in this sector acquired, representing 26% of total deals reported. Data and Analytics were in second place at 26 transactions, representing 19% of total deals reported. Blockchain earned the third place at 19 transactions, representing 14%.

• Overall, deal volumes decreased very slightly in Q4 2024 vs Q3 2024, with 135 in the current quarter versus 137 in the prior period.

• Average deal values, where reported, saw a marked overall increase in Q4, with a roughly $14 million decrease when excluding deals larger than $1 billion as outliers. Q4 saw three transactions valued at more than $1 billion.

• Public company valuations grew during the quarter, returning to the highs of late 2021.

• Overall, the M&A market for Financial Technology saw a slightly lowered level of activity compared to the previous quarter, with the number of acquisitions remaining mostly flat across sectors.