Global venture capital investment into the fintech sector this year has already reached US$30.8 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2011, according to a new report from a team of McKinsey consultants.  Average deal size is growing as well, particularly in Asia, where it is almost twice as large as the global average, a result, McKinsey said, was due largely to a number of mega-deals. The investing public is also enamoured of fintechs: Zhong An made waves with its $11 billion IPO valuation last year, while Ant Financial is reported to be raising a pre-IPO round valuing the company at $150 billion. In 2017, the ATM industry celebrated its 50th year, but it also was the time when the number of machines installed worldwide peaked at 3.3 million. After years of explosive growth, the ATM sector in China went abruptly into reverse in 2017, with deployers withdrawing 20,000 ATMs, Finextra reports. The displacement coincides with the rapid rise in mobile payment systems from China's tech giants Alibaba and Tencent. Similar, though less dramatic drops in ATM numbers are also expected to take place in several European countries, where bank card payments and bank branch closures explain the decline. Many bank CEOs expect a recession sometime soon, as do most chief financial officers of large US corporations, according to a Duke CFO Global Business Outlook poll, reports creditandcollectionnews.com Further, banks are pulling back from riskier loans, Reuters found in an examination of federal data. The institutions turned down almost half of applications from people with low credit scores, versus 43 per cent at the same time last year. Banks also closed accounts for 7 per cent of existing customers overall, with subprime borrowers feeling even more pressure. Home-equity credit lines were also down 7 per cent overall, and growth in credit cards and commercial lending was equally uninspiring.