FinTech financing hit $10.9 billion during the second quarter of 2019 – the second best quarterly performance ever recorded by FT Partners.

The San Francisco-based tech investment firm’s latest report recorded mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity during the first six months of this year already topping the entirety of 2018, at $148.3 billion, compared to $127.8 billion.

Excluding Ant Financial’s $14 billion financing in the second quarter of 2018, the second quarter this year is actually the largest ever, with North America and Europe both on track to reach record levels in terms of total financing volume. Europe has already exceeded the volume from last year at $5.8 billion in the first half of 2019.

M&A volume in the second quarter came in at $35.6 billion for over 230 transactions, according to FT Partners. This year so far has seen three of the four largest FinTech M&A transactions ever, all representing acquisitions of large payment processors: FIS’ $43 billion acquisition of Worldpay, Fiserv’s $41 billion acquisition of First Data, and Global Payments’ $25 billion acquisition of TSYS.

Alongside payments, challenger bank funding rounds, like N26 or Chime, have added fuel to the fire in that sector, while activity in PropTech firms, such as Knock and Opendoor, has helped the real estate sector.

The top North American Funding rounds so far in 2019 included UiPath’s $568 million round, SoFi bringing in $500 million, Lemonade getting $300 million, and Marqueta making $260 million.

Some of the top Europe deals so far this year have included: Greensil’s $800 million round, Transferwise getting $292 million worth of investment and Monzo making $144 million.

Overall, North America is on track for an all-time high of investment of over $21 billion this year, while Europe should capture $11.5 billion and Asia is down considerably from year prior ($25.8 billion) to record $7 billion of investment in 2019.

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