China and Oceania (primarily Australia, New Zealand) and are emerging from the pack in the APAC region, when it comes to acceptance and use of the fintech market, according to a new benchmarking report."The Asia-Pacific online alternative finance market is fluid, diverse, increasingly complex and growing at a rapid pace," noted the report issued yesterday, entitled Harnessing Potential - The 2015 Asia-Pacific Alternative Finance Benchmarking Report.The fintech sector - also known as alternative finance - is loosely defined as provision of finance to individuals and businesses through alternative channels via online marketplaces outside of the banking system, and includes peer-to-peer consumer and business lending, equity-based and reward-based crowdfunding online platform, and other.Luke Deer, who was on the research team, said: "What is surprising is how quickly Australia scaled up from admittedly a very low base three years ago, which was estimated at US$23 million in loan volume in 2013, growing to US$83 million in 2014, and US348 million last year."That indicates, firstly, that Australia, as a late starter has been able to learn from the experience of other jurisdictions. Also, there has been a greater involvement of institutional involvement in platforms here, such as Westpac's involvement with SocietyOne, allowing platforms to scale quite rapidly."The sort of rapid growth - from an admittedly very low base - nevertheless mirrors the expansion by the fintech sector throughout the Asia Pacific regionApplying the numbers presented in what its backers hope will be an annual benchmarking report, released yesterday, the Asia-Pacific online alternative finance market grew 323 per cent in 2015 to US$103 billion, led by a four-fold increase in China to US$102 billion.Overall, among APAC countries in terms of volume, it's China, Japan and Australia, but on a per capita basis, New Zealand (US$59.37) is a clear second behind China (US$74.54), and ahead of Australia (US$14.83), which reflects the lead time that NZ has had to develop their legislative framework, particularly crowdfunding.What's also interesting about the Australian experience to date, the research team suggested, is how much of the growth has come from business lending, such as invoice trading which means that retail, or "peer-to-peer" lending remains relatively undeveloped.Discussing the report, Ian Pollari, KPMG's global co-head of fintech, and his research collaborators from the Business Schools at Cambridge and Sydney Universities made it clear that, apart from tracking the dollars involved, one reason for running such a comprehensive report was to encourage better rules.His UK colleague, Warren Mead, KPMG's global co-lead of fintech: "In the early stages, there is a restricted view [by regulators] of what's possible through encouraging of the fintech industry."In the UK, the experience has been that the use of direct backing through the UK government's business bank, in tandem with specific regulation and policies that encourage the sector."He added that approach had allowed fintechs in the UK to expand their operations into the far more heavily regulated and less developed jurisdictions.The largest markets in 2015 beyond China, Japan and Australia were: New Zealand (US$268 million), South Korea (US$41 million)