Australia has the third biggest fintech sector in Asia-Pacific after Japan and China, with a bigger focus on business lending than most, but it is still a tiny part of the nation's finance market.
Per capita, however, New Zealand has been a more enthusiastic adopter, with $60 per head of population compared to just $14 per person in Australia coming from alternative finance.
In its first look at the region, KPMG and University of Sydney Business School's annual fintech report found Australia's "alternative finance" sector provided total funding of $US348.37 million ($462 million) in 2015, just short of Japan's $US360 million. 
The report is also supported by University of Cambridge and China's Tsinghua University.
This represented massive growth, up from just $82.87 million in 2014 in Australia, but the huge growth rate is echoed in most other countries.
A heartening finding for small business was that Australia had the most funds going to business from fintech lenders, at $120 million for traditional "balance sheet" funding, meaning the lender is akin to a small bank, not a marketplace lender.
The next biggest was also related to business lending, with a massive growth in invoice factoring via online marketplace-like platforms reaching around $105 million from zero a year before.
But both Japan and Australia were dwarfed by China's non-traditional financiers. Alternative finance has exploded there, quickly making it the biggest market for fintech in the world. Alternative finance amounted to $US101.7 billion in 2015, a 319 per cent growth from $US24.3 billion in 2014, up 337 per cent from just $5.6 billion in 2013, according to the KPMG report Harnessing Potential.
It has around 2600 P2P lending platforms, whereas Australia has at most about 15 to 20.
  Fraction of total funding   
KPMG's head of banking, Ian Pollari, said alternative finance was still a fraction of the total annual financing.
"Over all consumer finance and lending markets, alternative finance is still only 1 to 2 per cent of the total," he said.
"But Australia's alternative funding sector has grown faster than in the UK and the US."
Those two countries started out well more than a decade ago, whereas it was virtually non-existent in Australia two years ago. He estimates the fintech sector will still represent less than 10 per cent of the total market by 2020.
According to Reserve Bank of Australia figures, as of   January there was about $200 billion in unsecured personal debt ??? around $50 billion worth of credit card debt outstanding and $145 billion in personal loans. There was about $835 billion in business loans, but in Australia the vast majority of commercial loans are secured.
The mortgage market is worth about $1.4 trillion, but only a couple of alternative lenders have so far ventured into mortgages in Australia.
This has led many to predict there is still plenty of growth left in the sector before there is a consolidation here, which is widely expected to be coming soon in the UK and the US. 
The British equivalent provided &pound;3.2 billion ($6.1 billion) in finance in 2015, more than 15 times that in Australia. But alternative financing has been around in the UK for much longer and has had huge government support, with requirements that banks refer people to these new lenders if they won't lend to them themselves.
The UK government has also directly invested billions of pounds in P2P lenders and fund managers that lend to small business via its British Business Bank and British Finance Partnership.
Warren Mead, a UK-based KPMG partner focused on fintech, says new finance will reach "double digit" percentage of the overall market by 2020 in Australia, even though it will still be a lot less than that for the total funding.
But like many, he believes a shake-out is imminent in the UK, the US and China. 
"There are 100-plus [fintechs] in the UK, thousands in China. In each country we will see one or two significant players [emerge], and a small number of other niche players," he said. 
  Regulation key to growth  
Much of the growth and size of the niches within the sectors is related to regulation, or lack of it.
China has virtually no rules governing alternative finance, however these are coming in 2016, as many platforms go bust.
New Zealand has seen a stronger growth in equity crowdfunding than Australia because the NZ government introduced rules that legalised it about 18 months ago. Rules were introduced in Australia recently, but have been widely criticised as too onerous.
Per capita, NZ has the second biggest amount of funding coming from fintech at $267.7 million. The vast majority of alternative finance there is from P2P consumer lending, with virtually no non-bank business lending, after the government passed specific rules for P2P lenders.
More than 72 per cent of NZ respondents to the survey said regulatory settings were right. In Australia, about 48.5 per cent said the same thing.
In Australia, industry players say there is virtually no rules governing loans to business, so lenders don't even need a credit licence as long as they only lend to business not individuals, no matter the size of business.
Mr Mead, who arrived in Australia on Tuesday to launch the Asia Pacific arm of its report, said that in Britain licensing rules were the same for loans to business as to consumers below &pound;25,000.