Big Tech, Bank Workers Jumping Ship to FinTechs Up 75% Since Pandemic’s Start

Big banks and tech giants are losing staff to FinTech startups, according to a new analysis from workplace intelligence firm Revelio Labs.

As Bloomberg News reported Monday (June 6), departures from companies such as Goldman Sachs and HSBC to FinTechs like Revolut and Coinbase have risen 75% since the start of the pandemic.

Revelio said large numbers of workers are also departing companies like Amazon and Microsoft in favor of FinTech jobs.

Bloomberg noted that the rise in these highly-qualified workers moving to new sectors is happening in a tight job market, where tech employees have the power to seek out higher pay and more flexible schedules.

“People have stopped and re-evaluated what’s important to them,” Lisa Simon, an economist at Revelio, told Bloomberg, citing improved work-life balance, higher pay and better career prospects.

The Revelio report found that 37 employees left Goldman for Coinbase between January 2020 and April 2022. Another departed the bank for corporate credit card startup Brex Inc., while 18 took jobs at SoFi Technologies, the FinTech firm run by ex-Twitter executive Anthony Noto, per Bloomberg.

“There’s a war for talent,” Christian Faes, co-founder of LendInvest and chair of the industry group Fintech Founders, told Bloomberg. “We’re literally hiring people out of Facebook and Amazon, really high-tech engineers, and they don’t naturally gravitate toward banks with coding systems from the 1980s.”

Read more: Wall Street Embraces Crypto, but Not Quickly Enough for Some Employees

This news comes in the wake of a recent Wall Street hiring spree to add people to digital asset teams, as PYMNTS reported in April.

JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are among the big banks establishing crypto and blockchain-dedicated groups.

Speaking to CNBC earlier this year Umar Farooq — CEO of JPMorgan’s Onyx division — said the division’s concerns center around compliance and how to guard the bank’s brand — making it often slower-going than the typical crypto startups.

“There aren’t many places where you can roll out a new platform and that platform can go from literally nothing to transacting a billion dollars of trade a day in a few months,” he said. “That sort of scale can only be possible when you operate at a company like JPMorgan Chase. The upside of that scale is way more important than whatever downsides might exist by virtue of more regulations or controls.”