Emilien Coquard, CEO and Co-Founder of The Scalers
The fintech industry has evolved into one of the most exciting and ambitious industries in the world today. It now plays a crucial role in a variety of business sectors, including banking, investment management, education, fundraising, and others. The global pandemic accelerated the digital transformation of financial services and a report from Fortune Business Insights now projects that the fintech market will grow to more than $882 billion by 2030, exhibiting a CAGR of 17% during the forecast period (2023-2030).
This transformative period has been fuelled by fast-changing consumer behaviour, heightened digitalisation, rapidly evolving regulations and record levels of capital invested in the industry in the second half of the last decade. However, in a high-interest, high-inflation environment, fintech companies are facing more pressure than ever to now prove their value to secure investment.
As a result, organisations in this space must be able to develop compelling evidence of innovation and risk mitigation to secure continued funding at the same rate. As fintech companies explore use cases ranging from AI and ML for automated decision-making, hybrid cloud for security compliance and efficiency, and open banking and API collaboration for data sharing, they need to be able to tap into advanced tech talent, flexibly. This highly dynamic market requires highly dynamic talent acquisition.
Peddle to the metal – unleashing innovation at pace
According to BCG, nearly 80% of companies rank innovation among their top three priorities. However, as CIOs, CTOs and other fintech leaders grapple with the latest technologies – from AI and ML to open banking – many are looking to staff augmentation and outsourcing to support their innovation agendas. However, as they balance driving innovation with rising costs, we’re seeing CIOs seek partners for highly strategic or niche skills, not just commoditised capabilities as in the past.
This opens the door for ‘Offshore 2.0,’ which offers fintech CIOs and CTOs rightsized skills, the flexibility to spin teams up and down as priorities change, and the ability to do this at a fraction of the cost of building teams from scratch. It marries the necessity to deliver quickly to support growth and scale while investing in people and culture, to ensure teams are motivated to integrate and strive towards a company’s values and longer-term goals.
Exploring new hiring approaches that complement their homegrown talent, like Offshore 2.0, will enable fintech leaders to keep up with the dynamic pace of the industry. It will also help them access world-leading talent hubs to quickly plug skills gaps where a local solution isn’t available or isn’t available fast enough. Locations such as Bangalore are in high demand, with more than 90,000 engineers graduating from local universities every year. Bangalore specifically is now home to 1.5m software engineers, 400+ R&D centres, and 40+ unicorn companies.
Investing in the success of offshore talent
While stereotypes about low-quality work delivered by offshore teams are vastly outdated, it’s not uncommon to see these issues within teams that are working on many short-term collaborations and have a sense of detachment from the core team. Just as it would for an onshore team, this leads to high turnover and distracted teams that can’t give one project their complete focus.
This is why Offshore 2.0 is so important. Offshore teams shouldn’t be treated any differently than home teams and need to be made a seamless extension of domestic staff. When done well, offshoring can enable fintechs to quickly facilitate growth and innovation, while also developing a pool of highly skilled offshore talent that is committed to a company’s values and long-term goals.
To achieve this, the core tenets of Offshore 2.0 must be followed. This includes understanding and aligning on cultural dynamics; providing clearly defined, measurable objectives that align with the business’ wider strategy; establishing consistent and clear communication; promoting shared values to create a sense of unity; and investing in training, development and upskilling initiatives, as well as encouraging knowledge sharing.
By incorporating these processes into every stage of the offshoring process, fintech companies can see real success by integrating global talent into their teams. Offshoring should no longer be seen as a last resort or a simple cost-cutting measure. Those who choose to adopt Offshore 2.0 are those who will be able to dynamically adapt to a rapidly evolving sector and innovate while doing it, putting them in the perfect position to attract continual investment.
