According to the data of the recruitment firm Robert Walters, the creation of jobs within the space of financial technology in London increased by 61% over the past year. As the city was consolidated as a global center for new technology companies financial
This year, London will be home to as many unicorns of fintech as the current global leader of San Francisco, according to the report by Robert Walters and market analysis experts Vacancy Soft.
Of the 29 Fintech unicorns around the world, nine are in San Francisco, while seven are in the United Kingdom.
Electronic money companies grew 51% between 2017 and 2018, and it is projected that by 2020 more than half of payment service providers in the United Kingdom will be digital only. Such is the growth of the industry, that in 2018 the creation of jobs within the space of financial technology increased by 61%, which makes it the fastest growing sector in the London economy.
And the benefits were not only felt in the capital, last year, the boom in financial technology created an 18% increase in job creation in regions outside of London.
IT vacancies in the Fintech space increased
Ahsan Iqbal, director of technology at Robert Walters says, “IT continues to dominate the fintechs contracting agenda, with 30% of roles in the technology sector. In 2018, we saw that IT vacancies in the Fintech space increased by 74% compared to 2017.”
The increase in demand for IT talent, along with concerns related to Brexit, poses the risk of stifling the talent pool. As a result, we are already starting to see wage inflations for IT professionals of around 6-8%, and some pretty impressive buy and counterattack offers. In addition to IT, the most demanded roles within fintech are still marketing and public relations. However, the professions that have seen the greatest increase in hiring in most cases an increase of 100% since 2017 are the roles of human resources, accounting and business assistance. Since 2017, recruitment within the fintech space has also increased for the roles of banking 48%, law 40%, insurance 16% and sales 16%.