Fintech’s fruitless hunt for developers
What’s keeping most fintech founders up at night? Hiring and retaining tech talent. Sure, attracting decent staff has never been easy, but getting developers on board has now become a real ‘Black Friday’ shopping frenzy, regtech founders tell me. But unlike the retail panic-buying with discounts aplenty, the spend for fintechs is rocketing as salaries are increasing up to 25% per year. Startups need to splash the cash to secure talent, Fintech Files has found out. And counter offers are on the rise, too. One regtech told me it had lost three potential new employees to better offers elsewhere in the last month or so. “If you are a large company you can just pay £10K more for a good developer but a small company like us doesn’t have that luxury,” the founder said.

Visa hassle
Why is this happening? Fintechs in London are growing but the talent pool is not. What’s more, there are fewer job applicants from Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and Estonia since the Brexit vote, regtech founders say. They reckon many Europeans feel reluctant to move to London due to (you guessed it) Brexit uncertainty. But getting non-EU staff is also a pain, they say. Startups are having to spend a few thousand pounds on visa applications — a significant cost for small companies, especially if there’s no guarantee of them being successful. Bureaucracy, time and cost are big turn offs for small, nimble startups. One regtech said it took three months for an application to go through. Another fintech told me the Home Office investigated his company over whether it had attempted to fill jobs with UK applicants first before looking abroad.