Female-founded fintechs are performing better than male-led ones, but are still making up less than a fifth across the UK.

This is according to Scaling UK Regional Fintech, a study conducted by Innovate Finance, Streets Consulting, and Whitecape Consulting.

From 250 fintech scaleups outside of London, the report found that female-founded forms achieved 30% more turnover growth than male-founded fintechs.

However, female-founded firms made up only 16% of the surveyed startups, showing a great gender disparity in quantity, not quality.

Further, the survey found that fintechs with multiple founded tended to perform better in terms of more revenue growth.

“The data on diversity from this report is bitter-sweet,” Julia Streets, CEO of Streets Consulting said.

“Once again we see the benefits of diversity and inclusion, since FinTechs founded by women significantly outperform those founded by men; but once again we see the size of the challenge, as fewer than a fifth of FinTech firms are founded by women.”

Outside of gender diversity, the report revealed some other trends of fintech success outside of London.

Nine out of ten firms that participated in an accelerator programme went on to raise funding, which could give credence to regional startup hubs.

Interesting, while 87% of fintechs in the study had a B2B element to their go to market strategy, compared to 30% with B2C (business to customer), B2C firms performed better on average, achieving double the revenue and employee growth of B2B only firms.

“The research highlights some fascinating and surprising trends, but also contains valuable advice from those founders who have ‘been there and done that’ in terms of creating and growing new FinTechs,” Julian Wells, director & fintech lead at Whitecap Consulting, said.

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“The main message for us from this report is that in today’s world where you scale a business is nowhere near as important as how you scale a business.

He added: “What is not a surprise to us, is to see so many regional FinTech innovators succeeding outside of London – there is an extremely vibrant ecosystem of FinTech innovators across all four corners of our nation. These are exactly the kinds of data and insights which can help shape the UK’s effort to maintain its position as a true leader in global FinTech.”