KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech for the first half of 2026, published 25 August, counts $103.1 billion of global fintech investment across 2,100 deals, up from $72.2 billion in the second half of 2025. The Americas took $86.9 billion, the US alone $80.8 billion. Asia-Pacific fell to $4.6 billion from $7.1 billion, and within that India took $2 billion, South Korea $899 million, Singapore $499 million and Australia $456 million. China, on KPMG’s count, received $149 million across 33 deals. That is 0.14% of the global total, for a country that in the first half of 2018 hosted a single funding round, Ant Financial’s $14 billion Series C, worth more than half of all venture fintech investment on earth.
What KPMG says, and what it does not
KPMG is careful about the number. Part of the softness, its report says, “can be attributed to the structure of China’s fintech sector, including the maturity of its payments, consumer finance, and digital lending spaces. Many fintech capabilities have also been internalized by banks, insurers and large platforms.” Deals happen through partnerships and joint research “where funding primarily falls outside of conventional VC, PE and M&A”, and “actual demand for fintech innovation has not waned in China”. All of that is true. It is also a description of a market in which private capital no longer has a role, which is the point.
The companies that used to absorb that capital are shrinking. Qfin, one of the largest listed loan facilitators, reported second-quarter revenue down 31.6% and loan volume down 25.1%, and guided third-quarter net income down 67% to 73% year on year; its chief executive cited “a sudden industry-wide liquidity shock in late June”. FinVolution’s China volume fell 19.3%, and its chief executive said institutional funding “tightens at the moment”. Lexin’s net income fell 80.2% and it may post a loss in the third quarter. The shock was the collapse of Juzi Digital, a Liaoning facilitator whose platforms allegedly diverted borrower repayments into private accounts; Yingkou police opened a criminal case on 29 June, and the nearly fifty banks and consumer-finance companies that funded through it pulled lines across the sector. On top of that sits a regulatory price schedule: a 24% all-in cost cap since October 2025, 20% for consumer-finance companies, and a target of 12% by end-2027. Qfin’s loan balance fell from RMB126 billion at the end of 2025 to below RMB90 billion by mid-March.
Where the capital went instead
Capital in Chinese finance now moves from the state to the state. On 7 September the Ministry of Finance said it would issue RMB300 billion of special treasury bonds to replenish the core Tier 1 capital of eight state institutions, among them ICBC, Agricultural Bank of China, the Export-Import Bank and China Life. The People’s Bank of China has expanded the e-CNY operator network from 10 banks in January to 30 in August. Credit demand has gone the same direction. In July, net new yuan loans contracted by RMB340 billion, household loans fell by about RMB460 billion, and of the RMB1.4 trillion of total social financing, RMB1.32 trillion was government bond issuance. More than 97% of new credit to the real economy in July was the state lending to itself.
The platforms are living on what the rules leave them. Tencent’s fintech and business services revenue grew 9% in the second quarter, the slowest line in the company, driven by “commercial payment, wealth management and consumer loan services”. WeBank, the Tencent-backed digital bank that is the sector’s profit machine, reported 2025 revenue down 4.8% and profit up 1%; MYbank’s revenue fell 3.5%. The next constraint arrives on 30 September, when the online marketing measures for financial products take effect and confine in-app cross-selling to licensed institutions and their authorised staff, which is the layer above the rail that Ant, Tencent and Douyin had been counting on.
Ant, and the exit
Ant Group has not raised outside equity since regulators suspended its $34.5 billion listing in November 2020. A 2023 buyback valued it at about $79 billion, down from roughly $280 billion, and its profit contribution to Alibaba fell 79% in the March quarter. The one Ant entity that did raise money this year is the one outside China. Ant International, the Singapore-based cross-border arm, closed a $1.2 billion Series A in July, and the named investors were Ant Group and Alibaba. Bloomberg had reported in June that General Atlantic and Silver Lake were considering joining at a $10 billion valuation; the announcement does not name them, and KPMG’s China figure would not count the round anyway, since the company is Singaporean. The most valuable Chinese fintech asset of the decade is raising money from its own parents, offshore.
India shows what the alternative looks like. Its $2 billion half included Meta’s $900 million for a fifth of CRED and KreditBee’s $280 million Series E at a $1.5 billion valuation. Ant’s single 2018 round was about 94 times all of China’s fintech investment in the first half of 2026, and India’s half-year was thirteen times China’s.
The implication
For investors, “China fintech” as an asset class has become the state banks and the platforms’ regulated payment utilities, and the growth exposure has moved to Ant International, to India, and to the Chinese lenders’ overseas books, which is where FinVolution now earns 27% of its revenue. For the platforms, the question is whether the marketing rules leave any cross-sell margin at all after credit has been repriced toward 12%. And for anyone reading KPMG’s $149 million as a measurement error, the more useful reading is that it is a policy outcome. Beijing spent five years deciding that consumer finance would be run by banks at a capped price, and the capital markets have taken the decision at its word.