Analysis

What fintechs actually spend their money on

Every company on NeoBase that publishes a real profit and loss account, lined up against the one question a revenue number never answers: once the money is in, where does it go?

Based on 12 audited annual reports and SEC filings, out of 14 companies we hold financials for. Every figure is the company's own reported line, not our estimate.

Why these charts are narrower than they look

Two fintechs can run near-identical businesses and publish completely different cost lines. A US-listed group breaks out sales and marketing because its filing template asks for it; a UK bank folds the same spending into administrative expenses and never names it. Put everyone in one table and you are mostly measuring disclosure style.

So the charts below only count a company in a cost theme it actually reports. A missing bar means the company does not publish that line, not that it spends nothing on it. Companies that publish only adjusted or headline figures are left out of the comparisons entirely - their single lump of costs would top whichever theme it happened to land in.

Where the money goes

Each bar is that cost as a share of everything the company took in that year, so a bank and an exchange sit on the same scale. All the theme charts share one axis, which means a bar twice as long really is twice the burden.

What survives

Cost-to-income is the blunt version of the same story: how much of every unit the company earned was consumed before tax. Above 100% means the year cost more to run than it brought in.

Method and sources

Every figure is transcribed by hand from the primary document - the audited annual report or the SEC filing - and stored as the company reported it, in millions of its reporting currency. Nothing is converted between currencies: a share of income does not need converting, and a cross-currency total would need a rate we would then have to defend.

Themes group differently worded lines that mean the same thing, for instance technology and development, technology, and technology and data analytics. Lines too coarse to classify are left out of the themes rather than swept into overheads. Where a company's rounded lines do not close exactly to its reported bottom line, the diagram is balanced to its own lines and the difference stays under one rounding step.

Back to all money-flow charts