Senior Moves in FinTech, Q1 2023

FinTech hiring shifts as some sub-sectors grow while others see a decline

TALNT is an AI-driven platform for tracking executive moves which gathers and analyses all publicly-announced senior moves sourced from 3000+ reputable public sources around the globe.

This inSights report reviews the biggest global senior level hiring trends in FinTech. It will compare publicly available data to tell the story of what’s going on a quarterly basis. What year-on-year trends will we see and how significant are they for the year ahead?

Senior level hiring remained flat overall in Q1 2023 compared with Q1 2022

2023 trend:

2022 trend:

At first glance, it looks as if hiring in Q1 2023 was higher than last year. However, this is an illusion. While last quarter contained more hiring peaks than the same period last year, hiring in the first three months of 2022 was more consistent. As a result, while the numbers in 2023 were only very slightly increased, with 304 senior hires versus 293 in 2022 – a 3.8% increase.

Interestingly, as we will see in the charts below, this lack of overall change disguises a huge shift in hiring patterns, with two sub-sectors hiring significantly fewer senior roles last quarter compared with the previous year, and three sub-sectors increasing enough to make up the difference.

Let’s first take a look at the regional trends:

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

Regionally, we don’t see much significant change, although these charts do emphasise the consistency of senior hiring in Q1 2022 compared with the same period this year. As with most of our datasets, by far the most hiring was seen in the Americas region in both quarters, due partly to greater hiring activity in the region, as well as that region having more coverage of senior moves than the others.

If we now take a look at the senior hiring trends by sub-sector, we find a far more interesting set of data:

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

The charts above seems to show a massive decline in senior hiring in all sub-sectors aside from Non-Bank Tech, which has grown significantly – especially in the second half of last quarter. We categorise Non-Bank Tech as banking and related financial services technology not owned by, affiliated with or partnered banks or financial institutions directly.

With that in mind, what we appear to be seeing is a decline in investment in FinTech from the banks themselves as they attempt to deal with an uncertain global economy and high interest rates. This is leaving the field more open for the unaffiliated FinTech firms to fill the space.

However, that impression doesn’t take account of the significant year-on-year increases in InsurTech (424%) and RegTech (212%), which the above charts obscure somewhat due to the scale of the axes.

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

The chart above shows the trends more clearly. Looking at the bars, we can see how dramatic is the decline in senior hires in Banking Tech (295) and Blockchain & Crypto (55%). But the bars also more clearly show the increases in InsurTech and RegTech hiring.

The increased in InsurTech and RegTech are particularly interesting as the narrative around 2022 was that these had both been in possibly terminal decline as a result of higher interest rates strangling VC funding. What these numbers seem to show is that, even if fewer small startups are attracting investment, the two sub-sectors are experiencing sufficient growth to fuel a rise on senior hires.

This pie chart shows the same hiring story in percentages, and clearly shows the drastic drop off in Blockchain & Crytpo hiring – which makes sense in the context of a scandal-hit 2022. The percentages also make clear how significant is the hiring increase in Insurtech and RegTech.

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

The above chart breaks down sub-sectors by region and shows once again the global significance of the North American market. Interestingly, US dominance of the InsurTech and RegTech spaces have declined y-o-y as hiring has increased. Q1 2023 has seen more hiring in APAC generally, while the proportion of hiring inEMEA remains broadly the same y-o-y.

Most popular FinTech senior roles in Q1 2023

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

These charts show some interesting difference in the most popular roles hired for between Q1 2023 and Q1 2022. One interesting trend is how many more Director roles were filled last quarter, as well as the significant rise in appointments of Chief Revenue Officers. CTOs have remained consistently popular, which makes sense.

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

Taking a deeper diver into the regional breakdown of these most popular roles shows the influence of the Americas region, especially when it comes to CRO and CTO appointments. Indeed, Chief Revenue Officer is very much a North American role that was nowhere near as popular in other regions last quarter – although the relatively high number of Chief Commercial Officer appointments in EMEA suggests that this role may be the regional equivalent for many firms.

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

Looking at the top 10 companies in the sector who have made the most senior hires, the most interesting trend is that this remains a sector with a lot of change and turnover in which firms are growing the most at any given moment. The lack of “usual suspects” in the list of top 10 companies is strongly suggestive of a still young industry.