Global fintech investment reached $103.1 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $72.2 billion in the second half of 2025. The figures were dominated by a series of large US acquisitions, while investment in the EMEA region and Asia-Pacific fell to some of the lowest levels either has recorded in years.
The figures come from KPMG International’s H1’26 Pulse of Fintech report, which tracks global venture capital, private equity and M&A activity in financial technology using PitchBook data, published after the report’s embargo lifted on 24 August 2026.
US deals dominate the rebound
The Americas took $86.9 billion of the total across 1,120 deals, and the US alone made up $80.8 billion of that across 933 deals. That was more than three-quarters of global investment and, in KPMG’s wording, 92% of the Americas total.
Overall deal volume fell from 2,501 in the second half of 2025 to 2,100 in the first half of 2026, consistent with capital concentrating in larger transactions.
KPMG puts a number on that concentration: the top ten deals of H1 2026 accounted for 62% of all fintech investment, worth $64 billion between them. Eight of the ten were in the US, according to KPMG’s own regional deal data; the other two were in the EMEA region.
The largest was Global Payments’ $24.3 billion acquisition of Worldpay, a payments processor. The second-largest was FIS’s $13.5 billion acquisition of Global Payments’ own issuer-solutions business, a unit historically associated with Total System Services, or TSYS, a reminder that Global Payments was reshaping its own portfolio in the same half it was buying Worldpay.
Further down the list came the $8.4 billion buyout of investment-management platform Clearwater Analytics by a consortium led by Permira and Warburg Pincus, and the $6.4 billion take-private of OneStream.
EMEA and Asia-Pacific pull back
KPMG said EMEA was on pace for a decade low in both deal count and value, with investment down from $18 billion to $11.3 billion. Asia-Pacific investment fell from $7.1 billion to $4.6 billion.
Within Europe, the UK attracted the most, at $2.5 billion across 205 deals, ahead of Germany’s $1.6 billion across 36 deals. The Middle East, also part of the wider EMEA region, took $1.4 billion across 50 deals.
The region’s largest deals were considerably smaller than the US’s: a $1.2 billion buyout of Denmark’s Saxo Bank by J. Safra Sarasin Group, and a $1 billion acquisition of a minority stake in Belgium’s Kpler Holding by Sixth Street.
Payments leads sector investment
Payments was the busiest sector, attracting $44.2 billion in the first half of 2026, more than double the $20.2 billion invested across all of 2025, largely on the back of the Worldpay deal. Digital assets attracted $11.1 billion across 467 deals, and AI-focused fintechs took in $21.4 billion across 800 deals, KPMG said.
Anton Ruddenklau, global lead of innovation and fintech for financial services at KPMG International, said the recovery was uneven. “The first half of 2026 marked a meaningful turning point for the global fintech market,” he said. “But while investment continued to recover, the rebound was far from broad-based. The US drove investment in H1’26, fueled by strong VC investment and large-scale acquisitions, while EMEA and ASPAC regions saw investors remain cautious amid geopolitical uncertainty and ongoing macroeconomic pressures.”
The report doesn’t establish how much of the fall in deal volume came from reduced early-stage activity, as opposed to investors simply passing on smaller deals in favour of the megadeals above.
