Silicon Valley, New York City, and Boston all have thriving fintech communities, and are definitely worth a trip for the invested fintech entrepreneur, but the U.S. is already seeing a cluster of other fintech hubs emerge. These cities boast strong tech communities, talent pools, good coffee, and cheaper rents.

Cities in Georgia, Texas, Florida, and even Nebraska are starting to beckon more and more fintechs to to their shores, so Bank Innovation thought it would take a look at the top 5 emerging fintech hubs in the United States:

Atlanta

Atlanta has enjoyed a position as a hub for financial services, if not necessarily fintech, for quite a while. The city, which is presently playing host to a number of fintech startups, incumbents, and technology accelerators (including the Techstars Atlanta Program) is the place to be for payments companies, to the point where some have nicknamed areas of the hub things like “Transaction Alley.”

For the older guard of digital payments, companies NCR and WorldPay are both currently headquartered here, and of course, it’s the birthplace of the Atlanta Automated ClearingHouse, or ACH.

In more recent years, a number of fintech players have joined Atlanta’s roster, many of them exploring the future of payments. Atlanta startups like BitPay have become players in bitcoin payments, allowing users to store, save, and transact bitcoin via mobile or through its physical card, powered by Mastercard (which allows users to convert the currency to dollars for spending, for those who haven’t checked bitcoin’s price in a while), contributing to the rise of the kind of open systems of financial exchange championed by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. The company is now one of the world’s largest processors of bitcoin.

Meanwhile, startups like Ingo Money, headquartered in the nearby Roswell, Georgia, have become leading members for the financial world’s war on checks, enabling businesses to “push” payments to clients without relying on  those outdated forms of exchange. Startups like First Performance Global are innovating the authorization side of payments, using data analytics, social media, and automation to make sure its businesses stay competitive.

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