A blue moon or so ago, I was the Recruitment Ad Director at the now defunct Rocky Mountain News in Denver, so employment trends are something I like to keep a pulse on. And it turns out that the fintech employment sector has held steady during the pandemic.
London-based Computerweekly.com is reporting that fintech- and payment-sector related jobs bounced back significantly after a brief drop-off following the initial COVID-19 lockdowns.
Digital Wealth News also monitors venture capital activity in the sector, and has also noted that investment in the sector has held steady, another parallel indicator to the corresponding fintech industry job market.
Think logically why the above trends are occurring. With more people working remotely, shopping digitally, investing with apps and with wealth managers communicating more regularly with their clients through their tech portals, the need for staffing to support these digitally-based fintech and wealthtech firms would have to stay at pace in order to deliver the best user experiences for their customer bases. And they need capital and staffing to make that happen.
European-based consultancy Headcount recently released results of a survey that showed lack of sufficient talent pools for fintech firms as their user bases expanded.
According to the report, the pandemic has created staffing issues at mid- and senior-level positions, and in some cases, made hiring for those positions more difficult. Per the published research, “COVID-19’s impact, which has increased unemployment rates worldwide, has certainly resulted in more CVs in employers’ inboxes, but it has barely changed the picture at mid and senior levels. Candidates have been understandably more risk-averse regarding career moves, and cross-border hiring has become substantially harder.”
While the report is European-centric, the trend is no doubt similar in the US, where there has been a huge uptick in fintech adoption within all related sectors. Retail investors are using more apps like Robinhood and Coinbase to invest and trade their portfolios. More digital shopping is resulting in more fintech payments activities and wealth managers are using far more wealthtech tools then ever before.
The pandemic has no doubt accelerated mainstream usage of fintech, and with that adoption, the job sector will continue to bode well for those within financial technology industries.
