Invest Atlanta is a supporter of Atlanta’s burgeoning FinTech community – one of the largest in the U.S. – through incentives, permitting assistance, and helping to bring key industry collaborators to the city.

FinTech, or financial technology that leverages financial services transactions, has made Georgia into what has become known as Transaction Alley, because 70 percent of the nation’s financial transactions pass through Georgia-based software systems. Invest Atlanta has had a large role in creating that critical mass of FinTech activity, as its efforts to secure funding for business relocation and expansion. In the past year NCR, Worldpay, Equifax and InComm have announced relocations or expansions in Midtown and Downtown.

Fully 100 FinTech companies have corporate headquarters or a major presence in Georgia, and six of the 10 largest payments processing firms are based in the state. Only New York and California, which exact a much higher cost for doing business, have higher annual revenues than the $72 billion generated by FinTech businesses in Georgia. Those businesses process more than $118 billion in transactions each year, and in doing so they support almost 4 million merchants. More than 30,000 people work in Georgia’s FinTech sector.

As big as Georgia’s FinTech footprint is, Atlanta’s FinTech ambitions are even bigger. Last year, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the Technology Association of Georgia and the American Transaction Processors Coalition founded the FinTech Atlanta coalition with the express purpose of making Atlanta the recognized global FinTech capital by 2020. Towards that end, the task force in April named the 20-plus companies that will be its charter members in pursuing three main goals: recruiting FinTech companies, capital and talent; retaining existing FinTech businesses and workers; and expanding Atlanta’s industry presence through organic growth and the strengthening of the local FinTech infrastructure.