The hub of the technology industry is Silicon Valley. In finance, the world capitals have long been London and New York.But in the emerging industry that combines finance and technology, often called fintech, the center of activity is less obvious. The traditional centers, London, New York and San Francisco, are attracting substantial investment, but so are less-established capitals like Berlin, Singapore and Sydney, Australia.

The lack of a clear winner has been apparent to executives like Chris Larsen, chief executive of the San Francisco company Ripple, which offers international payment processing services to banks. Mr. Larsen fields a steady stream of calls from representatives of foreign cities hoping to lure him and his company to their shores to bolster their fintech credentials. “Everybody recognizes that the capital of fintech has yet to be determined,” said Mr. Larsen, who founded the fintech companies Prosper and E-Loan. Several cities around the world are competing to become the capital, or at least one of the regional capitals, of fintech. If the young financial technology industry has the transformative effect that some have imagined, the contest could also determine the future capitals of finance as a whole.

At the recent Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas, the largest fintech conference in the world, government representatives from Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg and Belfast, Northern Ireland, among others, were walking the floor looking to woo companies. In the exhibition hall, Invest Hong Kong, a quasi-governmental agency, had a booth where start-ups could learn about the regulatory benefits and subsidies the government of Hong Kong recently began to offer fintech companies.

Hong Kong has the benefit of being connected to China, which has, mostly in isolation, been home to some of the most notable developments in the fintech world. Chinese fintech companies like Alipay and Tencent have been processing more financial transactions than the largest Chinese banks. The four most highly valued fintech unicorns (companies valued at $1 billion or more) are based in mainland China, according to most recent surveys.Early this year the chief executive of Hong Kong’s central bank, Norman Chan, announced a multipronged effort to become a “Fintech Innovation Hub.”

The announcement earlier this week that Intuit, the financial software giant, would be buying the personal finance company Credit Karma for $7 billion was striking. The tech industry is under more antitrust scrutiny than ever; just a few weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission announced a broad inquiry into the past decade of acquisitions by the five biggest tech giants, with a focus on mergers that kill off budding rivals. This deal certainly raises that prospect: Intuit and Credit Karma compete on various fronts, and Intuit’s most recent federal filings named Credit Karma’s free tax preparation software as a threat to its dominant offering, TurboTax. Intuit has said it will keep Credit Karma's service free, and probably needs to promise as much to regulators to get the deal approved.

But antitrust enforcers, whose core responsibility is to keep markets competitive and protect consumers, are not just watching for mergers that kill off rivals. They’re also starting to look more closely at how tech companies acquire and use data. And that seems to be the main event here. The companies themselves have suggested that a driving force behind the merger is Intuit wanting to get its hands on Credit Karma’s stash of user data. Which raises an important question: Do consumers benefit from deals where the key asset being sold is their own personal information? We’re talking about a lot of data here. Credit Karma, whose business is built around a free credit monitoring app, boasts more than a hundred million users. While those people don’t pay to use Credit Karma, they do turn over their financial information, as well as the kinds of behavioral and location data that other companies, like Facebook and Google, track.

Banking has long been viewed as one of the last traditional, old-school, stuck-in-the-past industries. When you think of banking, you might still think of wood-paneled walls and pinstripe suits. That impression may increasingly be misguided. If you spend more than 15 minutes with any senior executive of a large bank these days, it is almost impossible not to hear the phrase “fintech” uttered. It is usually spoken with a sense of optimism, but sometimes with a sense of dread. “Fintech,” of course, is short for financial technology, a catchall for a near-revolution of new technologies aimed at upending parts of the financial world, including payments, wealth management, lending, insurance and currency. The fintech phrase itself is actually not new — it dates to the late 1980s and early 1990s — though it has taken on a heightened sense of importance and urgency now that it has been embraced by Silicon Valley as the new new thing. An estimated $19 billion of investment poured into the fintech bucket last year, according to Citigroup, up from just $1.8 billion five years earlier.

“The real threat to banks is not from Washington or Brussels but from start-ups all over the country creating interesting fintech start-ups that are chipping away at key parts of their franchise,” said Steve Case, a founder of AOL and an entrepreneur with investments in several fintech businesses, who just wrote a book about the future, “The Third Wave.”