Fintech job seekers advised to look to B2B businesses
Candidates looking for work in the fintech space should focus on business-to-business (B2B) roles, as business-to-consumer (B2C) reels from the economic uncertainty of the past few months, a recruitment expert has said.
Jobbio chief executive Stephen Quinn said that over the past five years, B2C fintech roles have been in greater demand as a raft of new payments products came to the market. The onset of Covid lockdowns boosted e-commerce, leading to a hiring spree among many big B2C businesses such as Klarna and Stripe.
However, the recent downturn and talk of recession has caused a raft of redundancies at the big payments firms, making B2B the best prospect for those looking for new fintech roles.
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“All of the money was flowing into B2C fintech products that were Neo banks, etc. And it’s obviously been a very exciting time in fintech the last five years, but I would say in the last quarter, it’s taken a total turn,” he said.
“They’ve made something like 20 to 25 per cent of the typical number of redundancies. They’re letting go of thousands of people.”
On the plus side, there are certain roles that will remain resilient in a downturn and Quinn says in fintech these are AI, machine-learning, security and regulatory compliance.
“Whereas buy-now-pay-later in the consumers space is taking a back seat, the buy-now-pay-later stuff in the B2B space looks like a really exciting place to be”, Quinn said.
“And investments in insurance have just overtaken investments in payments this year because obviously there’s there’s a lot of room for innovation in that space now.”
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Quinn believes the competition for roles will be high, but says recruiting firms need to make sure they communicate as clearly as possible what the culture of the business is and who they want to apply for their roles. “They want people to self-select as much as possible,” he said.
As such, the onus will be on communicating company culture, its long-term mission, and what benefits it offers. Remote working is likely to be among the popular requisite for jobseekers, many of whom came out of the pandemic with little desire to return to an office full-time.
Quinn estimates that around 30 per cent of senior roles in fintech now have a remote element written into them. But massive salaries may not be the main route to attracting new talent.
“I think companies will take the opportunity to introduce salary freezes because if you’re doing mass redundancies, you can’t be seen to be giving people masses increases in salary,” Quinn explained.
“So it just comes down to how valuable you are to the company at any given time. I think that if you look at those big growth areas of AI, machine learning, the regulatory stuff, cybersecurity, those spheres are going to be really well rewarded, now and into the future because they’re just such a vital cog in the fintech infrastructure.”
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