#Fintech influencers you should be following in 2016

Digital social networks have become places that we increasingly go in order to stay informed and up-to-date on the top news and best thinking in our industry – whatever that industry is. Of course, journalists and trade media still play an important role, as do business leaders and subject-matter experts, in informing the discussion of relevant issues in any industry, but social networks are becoming the channels through which knowledge and interactions are mediated.

Thus, social networks are giving rise to an entirely new breed of digital influencers that cannot be ignored. As Chris Ghedhill points out, this is because online influencers have three important qualities:

• they have targeted audience reach,
• they’ve earned the trust and respect of their audience; and
• they share a high-quality stream of relevant information.

See also: How to use an influencer list

Influence can be a tricky term to pin down, which is only complicated by its highly subjective component. A skeptic might look at any list of so-called “online influencers” and dismiss many of them as more competent in gaming the online influence system than anything else. Whether or not you completely buy into these new notions of influence, it is hard not to acknowledge the role these influencers play in disseminating information through their networks.

It is with this in mind that I updated my Fintech100 list that was compiled back in late 2015 and replaced it with a larger list of #fintech influencers that we need to pay attention to in 2016. The new list of 250 fintech influencers is based on a larger sample size of almost 7,000 online identities using the Little Bird software engine. I have also filtered out the individual identities from the business identities based on the Twitter account segmentation into “person” or “company”. You can view the list directly in Google Docs as well.