A tale of 44 cities | Methodology • Proximity to expertise: availability and level of talent (financial services, technological and Dropdown Questions entrepreneurial talent) within the Hubs. For example, is there a vibrant financial services or tech sector 01. What are the top five innovation areas in your Hub? in the Hub? Is there a balanced mix of skills? Is there a strong STEM education pipeline? If there isn’t 02. What are the top five underlying technologies to make those innovations happen? strong homegrown talent, are there initiatives to attract talent from other Hubs? 03. What are the top three challenges of doing business there? • Innovation culture: Hubs’ attitudes to innovation. For example, how many entrepreneurs and Narrative Questions startups are in the Hub? What is the attitude towards risks and failure? Is there a history 01. What sets you apart from other regional Hubs? of collaborating to develop new ideas? 02. Who are the big investors? • Government support: extent to which the Hubs’ government (local and state) supports FinTech. 03. What are the top accelerators and work spaces? For example, is FinTech on the government’s agenda? Has the government enacted or supported policies 04. What are the top FinTech companies in your Hub? that promote FinTech growth? Does the government provide funding for FinTech companies, events or 05. What is the biggest success story to come out of your ecosystem? co-working spaces? 06. What does the next 12 months look like? Dropdown and Narrative Questions Deloitte reviews These questions were comparatively subjective. Nevertheless, they constituted an important part To provide an additional layer of depth and challenge to the self-evaluations for the 24 New Hubs, of the development of the Connecting Global FinTech: Hub Review. The narratives enabled the we also reviewed Hub Representatives’ responses with Deloitte’s global network of FinTech SMEs. creation of “Hub Profiles” for the Hubs, which can be expanded upon in future editions in order to Challenges and changes proposed by SMEs were presented back to Hub Representatives further develop Hub comparisons. This could include, for example, developing the criteria (such as for them to accept or reject. market value, or value of investments) for selecting the “Top” companies, investors or accelerators. Hub Representatives were asked to select the most significant technologies, innovation areas Responses for Hubs profiled in the Connecting Global FinTech: Hub Review 2016 were reviewed and challenges in their local FinTech market from a dropdown list provided by the GFHF. Here, with Deloitte SMEs at the time of research and have not been reviewed again in the current innovation areas refer to the financial services sectors being disrupted by FinTech. Interim report. Individual Hubs have been the subject of extensive research and data collection, and the relevant The final opinions published are that of the Hub Representatives’ and not the opinions of the Hub Representatives have reported both subjectively and objectively derived responses. The future GFHF or Deloitte. objective will be to increase the standardisation of reporting across global Hubs. 12