FinTech: the alternative graduate career in finance

Innovate Finance's Director of Policy and Regulation, Dan Morgan, explains why graduate jobs in FinTech must be on your watchlist of exciting new sectors to explore.

With billion dollar startups dominating the business pages, the disrupters are hitting the financial mainstream and London is at the forefront of this growth - from both a business and hiring perspective.

Although no one definition exists, FinTech represents many innovations and many services across sectors and includes everything from mobile payments, crowd funding platforms and peer-to-peer lending to challenger banks and digital currencies. At the heart of all this increase in graduate FinTech jobs and innovation is a better understanding of the 21st century customer and the demands for more flexibility and greater choices in finance. New products are emerging regulary and opportunities abound for eager job-seekers.

Innovate Finance is an independent membership association that represents the UK's global FinTech community. Our members are innovatively disrupting traditional systems and are actively working to solve issues relating to financial inclusion, payments (paytech), regulation (regtech), remittance, funding (and crowd-funding), financial risk, insurance, and savings and investment, and helping to rebuild public trust in the financial system.

We support our members across a range of services from scale up programmes to helping them with the regulator. We are based at Level39, which is Europe’s largest Technology Accelerator and a space for early-stage FinTech businesses that have potential for high-growth. It’s a great place to work to understand what’s hot in FinTech and has a bird’s eye view across London.

It’s not the only one though, London is booming with accelerators and incubators creating steady stream of FinTech start-ups.

Apply for the latest graduate FinTech jobs on BrighterBox here. 

Why London, Why FinTech?

London has the world’s largest financial services sector, supported by a neighbouring booming tech sector. The combination of these two neighbouring thriving sectors is something that distinguishes London from the likes of Silicon Valley or Wall Street.

From Shoreditch to Canary Wharf, FinTech represents a merging of the previously distinct sectors. FinTech start-ups hire coders and bankers, while tech giants such as Apple and Google are moving into payments and other financial services, hiring bank execs as well as computer scientists.

break-v1

This is all happening in London with tech, capitalists and large financial institutions broadly participating and collaborating in the same space. In fact, UKTI’s recent report revealed that foreign direct investment went up 50% in the UK last year, making the UK the third in the world for investment. London has an enviable and diverse talent pool, with more workers in FinTech than either New York City or Silicon Valley.

Whether it's tech, finance or just the casual dress code, the London FinTech scene is not one to be ignored for any recent graduate.

Dan Morgan
Director of Policy and Regulation
Innovate Finance
Follow @danmorgan1